Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

iPad Classroom Workflow: Publishing Student Videos to YouTube

It’s not the “norm” today but it should be: Every K-12 classroom teacher needs access to a YouTube channel to publish student work as well as their own videos. The past two years I’ve used a classroom YouTube channel for my elementary STEM class. Video is a very powerful medium, and Google provides teachers via YouTube with (in the words of Jim Sill) unlimited, high definition, mobile-friendly video hosting for FREE. Consider:

Maker Studio  - Green Screen Student Vid by Wesley Fryer, on Flickr
Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License   by  Wesley Fryer 

We live in a fantastic day for communicating stories of learning from our classrooms to parents and others in our communities via online video. It’s still a challenge to manage the “workflow” of publishing student videos to a common YouTube channel, however, especially in contexts (like mine) where students do not yet have individual Google accounts via Google Apps for Education. In this post I’ll explain the process (or “workflow”) I’m now using to publish student videos on our classroom YouTube channel, as well as a few recent tutorial videos I’ve created for students and teachers to assist with this workflow. I have 300 students in 12 classes each semester and a classroom cart of 20 iPads, so the workflow I’m using may or may not work for your context. I’m publishing 5 to 10 student videos per week now.

To support my students wanting to publish videos from our STEM class “Maker Studio” to YouTube (which can include Lego stopmotion, green screen videos, Rube Goldberg project videosSphero videos or MinecraftEDU videos) I’ve created a new page on my STEM curriculum site sharing YouTube publication steps and procedures. The basic steps are:

  1. Save/Export Final Video to Camera Roll
  2. Use InstaShare to Transfer Video to Dr. Fryer’s iPhone
  3. Fill Out our Video Request Form
  4. Dr Fryer will Upload with YouTube Capture

InstaShare is a free iOS app which supports the unlimited transfer of photos and videos between iPads / iOS devices. My favorite app to use for iOS and iOS to laptop/desktop media transfers is actually Photo Sync, but since it’s not free we use InstaShare in my classroom. InstaShare isn’t as fully featured, but it works and it’s free. (You only pay if you want to transfer from iOS to a laptop/desktop computer.) It’s one of the required apps in my 3 day iPad Media Camp workshop. I created a 2.5 minute video tutorial for my students, explaining how to use InstaShare in our classroom. This is the first video I’ve used on my MacBook Air laptop since installing OS X 10.10 Yosemite, which supports direct screencast capture of a lightning adapter iOS device using free QuickTime software. See this January post by Joyce Valenza (@joycevalenza) for steps on how to do this.

The “video request form” I’m using is actually a paper / printed Google Doc, and it works ok for our classroom schedule. It can sometimes still be hard to figure out exactly which video belongs to which student(s) when uploading, but it helps having students record the duration of their video in SECONDS. (Silent Lego Stopmotion movies don’t give many hints about who the original authors/creators were!)

The final step is uploading the finished video using the free YouTube Capture app. If you have a classroom YouTube channel and iOS device and are not already using both the YouTube Capture and YouTube Studio apps, download them today. They are both super and free from Google.

I recorded a 6.5 minute video this week with our school librarian, showing her the steps of using both InstaShare and YouTube Capture to publish student videos in our “Enhanced eBook Library Project” this year. I apologize the quality of this second video isn’t fantastic (there is a lot of screen glare) but hopefully this can help you as well if you’re interested in replicating or modifying the workflow I’m describing here. I plan to record a higher quality version of the YouTube Capture portion of this video in upcoming weeks, and when I do I’ll update this post with it.

What workflow do you use to publish student videos to YouTube?


Posted

in

, , ,

by