A great way to easily download videos from YouTube...

In South Africa the Internet can be a real problem in the classroom at times. You want to show a Youtube video clip to your classes as an introduction to a lesson,  but when you click on it the video buffers and buffers! Ever experienced that? So the best thing to do in my opinion is to download the video. That poses the question: ‘How do you download a video from YouTube quickly and easily?’ There are several ways one can do this. One way is to use savefrom.net.

This is what I discovered when trying to download a YouTube video using Windows 10.

1.  Remove the http://www. details from the YouTube URL

Find the video that you want to download. Replace the initial part of the YouTube URL, http://www. (including the full stop) with ss  (For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1AqXLCsC1c becomes:  ssyoutube.com/watch?v=A1AqXLCsC1c).

2. Download the video

This will take you to  a page on savefrom.net http://goo.gl/f3x3c4 .. You’ll be asked if you would like to install the program (I did). By the way beware of other enticing video downloaders advertised on that page. Just stick to the green download button next to the image of your video.

3. Check the video on your deviceIt works!

4. The download button appears under online videosBest is that the green download button now appears under all YouTube videos AND on Vimeo videos I have discovered! From this point onwards you don't have to do the 'ss' thing or anything else. All you have to do is press the green download button and the video downloads. Awesome right? 

Try this process especially if you are a teacher.

Google Slides: Make a cheat sheet

When I came across @cogswell_ben's superb Google Cheat Sheets I realised that these are a great example of a different way of using Google Slides.  Ben has kindly given these a Creative Commons license so that they can be reused. One can't embed them but if you click on the images below you'll be taken to the originals. However, this is such a useful way of providing tutorials to students. 

CLICK ON THE IMAGES

https://goo.gl/GSJCh7

https://goo.gl/hZuGz1 

https://goo.gl/zjcrQT

https://goo.gl/EDylt6

This concept is so useful for creating documents for students to use in the classroom.  It is definitely worth pursuing the topic of Hyperdocs! Visit Ben's blog https://goo.gl/OqQh1M 

Google Slides: Publish a Google Slides story in different ways on the Internet

Google Slides is great for writing stories. One can use half a slide for the story and the other half for the illustration.  My Grade 5 class took part in a writing project with two schools in other countries - one in the USA and one in Argentine. We wrote collaborative stories, with my class working in groups of three and starting the story. We were also responsible for the final editing and the illustrations. We used a purchased program that is no longer available to do the illustrations.

It can also be presented online as a Google slideshow as illustrated below. However, the great thing about writing a story in Google Slides is that it can be downloaded as PDF and then uploaded to a variety of free online sites such as Slideboom, Slideshare and Youblisher among others.   The example below shows the story in Google Slides as a presentation and then in Youblisher as an e-book.

a) As a Google online slideshow



b) In Youblisher.com as an e-book
Click on the image below to be taken to Youblisher.com http://goo.gl/QPd6Nn