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Practical Pointers for YouTube

Practical Pointers for YouTube

If you’re a teacher, there's a good chance that you use YouTube. Whether you send students to your own videos or someone else's, I think you’ll find many of these pointers particularly handy.

There is not an emoji for everything, so symbolically representing vocabulary can be a stretch—a really big thinking stretch when you’re the one developing the representation. It can take a while to figure out how to clearly show a vocabulary term with emojis, which is why symbolically representing vocabulary can be a great learning activity.

👋😁 Enter text into emojitranslate.com. It replaces some words with pictures. You can copy the “emojified” text and paste it anywhere. This is handy for spicing up instructions, playing with language, making announcements, telling a story, and getting a laugh.

🎬👀👍 Want to learn how to make your videos even more awesome? How about joining me for Classy Videos Summer 2018? My online workshop takes place in Google Classroom July 3 through August 13, 2018. Each week I produce a new instructional video, and each week there’s an optional assignment where you get to practice the skills from the video. Classmates and I give encouragement and feedback on assignments. I lead this workshop last winter and absolutely loved the short videos that my classmates produced. Join the 75+ educators who have already registered for #ClassyVideos Summer 2018. Read more and register at learninginhand.com.

I like being one click away from each of the webpages and documents that I frequently open. I’ve added links to what I often visit to Chrome’s bookmarks bar. The problem is most of the things I’ve bookmarked have long names–names that take up precious space. I deal with that by right-clicking each bookmark and replacing the name with a descriptive emoji. For example, I often access a Google document about tech camp. I’ve added the document to my bookmark’s bar and have replaced the name with a tent emoji. The bookmark takes up less space, allowing me to fit more links onto the bookmarks bar. 👍

The suggested videos that are shown after a YouTube video finished playing can be annoying, distracting, and sometimes inappropriate. If you’d like to share a link to a YouTube video and do not want suggested videos to be displayed when the video finishes, add ?rel=0 to the end of the video’s URL before you share it.

Flaticon.com has a growing collection of icons and clipart. In fact, they boast that 4,000 icons are added each month. You’ll most likely be downloading images as PNG. PNG images can be used in pretty much any app. PNG supports transparency, so you’ll see no white boxes around these icons! While you can use Flaticon for free, you are required to attribute the illustration to Flaticon. If you pay $90 a year or $10 a month for a Premium subscription you can use all illustrations without any attribution. Paid subscribers also get access to premium icons.

There are several reasons why you may want to blur faces in your video. Perhaps you don’t have permission, perhaps a stranger entered a shot, or perhaps your video features a mystery person. Here’s how to blur faces: After your video is uploaded to YouTube, click the Edit Video button. Then click the Enhancements tab, and then click the Blurring effects tab. After clicking Edit next to Blur Faces, YouTube will begin the process of finding faces in your video. It can take quite a while to process, and it’s ok if you leave YouTube and return later. After processing, you’ll see thumbnails for each of the faces that YouTube detected. Click the thumbnail(s) of the faces you’d like to blur. You can play the preview to see frosted circles placed over the selected face(s). YouTube uses motion tracking, so the blur moves with the face. You can save the changes in the existing video or save as a new video.

The right color combination can make a gradient look truly stunning. Whether you are going for splashy or subtle, uigradients.com has a beautiful selection of gradients. When you first visit the site, you see just one of their gradients. Click “Show all gradients” to see all 300 color combinations. Click a color from the color bar near the top of the page and see gradients within that color family. One way to get a gradient from uigradients.com is to download a jpg of the gradient and use that as the background of your graphic. Another way is to copy the hex code uigradients.com provides. Those hex codes can be pasted to create custom gradients in apps like Google Slides.

I often use a gradient as the background in my graphics. I tend to use subtle gradients, combining two similar colors to create an illusion of depth, texture, shine, or glow. Google’s drawing tools have 42 preset gradients, but I like to choose the exact colors used in my gradients. I can do that with a custom gradient. Here’s how: Instead of choosing a Solid fill, I click Gradient and then choose Custom. In the Custom Gradient settings, I click the first gradient stop and then click the Fill color. I can use the color picker or paste a hex color code. I then click the second gradient stop, click the Fill color, and input a second color. I can change the angle so that the colors fall in different directions, or I can also change the type from Linear to Radial.

You can get quick access to an emoji picker on a Windows 10 or Mac computer. Call up an emoji keyboard in Windows 10 by holding down the Windows key and pressing period. On macOS, hold down Control and Command and press the space bar to make an emoji picker appear. Both of these keyboard shortcuts require the cursor to be in a text box.

A new post is always added to the top of the class stream in Google Classroom. However, the newest post is not always the first post you want students to see. A teacher in Google Classroom can bump any assignment, announcement, or question post to the top of the class stream by clicking the post’s menu (three dots) and then choosing the Move to Top option. That post will become the second post after a new post is added (at which time you can choose to move it back to the top again).

The newest version of Keynote for iOS, which is free, includes drawing tools. You can use these tools to make a cartoon version of a photo by tracing! You can trace with a finger, stylus, or Apple Pencil. Using drawings in your presentations and graphics can give them a friendly and unique look. You can simplify by excluding the photo’s background. And with a drawing, you can change colors and other details–your traced drawing doesn’t have to exactly match the photo you’re tracing. For example, you can trace a map and add your own color coding.

There is a workaround for making text 𝐛𝐨𝐥𝐝, 𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘤, and 𝕗𝕒𝕟𝕔𝕪 in #GoogleClassroom! Until Google Classroom adds the ability to format text in posts, we’re stuck with using only text and emojis. Google Classroom doesn’t even give us a way to bold text within a post. The good news is that we can use “fancy text” to emphasize words. If you go to coolsymbol.com/cool-fancy-text-generator.html (tonyv.me/fancy for short), you can type a word, phrase, or sentence. The site generates a variety of options using universal characters. These options are fancier than a standard font. Each option has a Copy button and you can paste the fancy text anywhere you can enter regular text—and that includes posts in Google Classroom. Fancy text will surely stand out from the rest of the post. Use fancy text to emphasize titles, due dates, names, project requirements, book titles—whatever you want to stand out in your post.

You can use the free Pages app as a teleprompter! Apple has added Presenter Mode to the Pages 4.0 iOS app. Presenter Mode automatically scrolls text, and you can set the speed at which the text moves up the screen. The ability to present text in a teleprompter is handy for when recording videos. You could record video with one device and use a second one for Presenter Mode.
#ClassyVideos #AppleEDU #AppleEDUchat #iteachtech #iteach #edutech #edtech #NETA18 #iPadED #teachershare

When editing with software like iMovie or WeVideo, consider adding b-roll when your main shot is someone speaking on camera. Cutting away from the main shot to supplemental footage can make your video more interesting. B-roll is typically muted because the main shot’s audio continues as the b-roll is shown. You may include a few different b-roll clips before returning back to the main shot. In fact, you may cut back and forth between your main shot and b-roll several times.

Got several Safari tabs open on your iPhone or iPad? Want them all closed? Instead of tapping each tab’s tiny X button, there is a way you can close all tabs at once. Simply long-press the Tabs button, which is the icon with two overlapping squares. Then tap the option to close all tabs. Ta-dah! #edutech #iteachtech #ipaded #edtech #teachersofinstagram