GifYoutube: create short looping .gifs from YouTube clips

GifYoutube is very easy to use, just find your clip on YouTube, go to the GifYoutube website and paste the YouTube link into the box on the front page. You can then set the starting point of your gif using a sider or typing in the time in the box, with a handy preview of the video to help you. Use the right-hand slider to set the length of the clip (maximum 15 seconds)

Example

First I select the YouTube clip for my source video:

Skip to gif start point

And here is the end result:

Click to open on GifYoutube site

I'm sure there are many uses people can think of for this, but I wanted to show some short video clips as part of a starter activity: showing the clips through YouTube would have meant timing the starts, restarting the clips manually and possibly even showing each clip one after the other. What I decided to do instead was to create a table to display my four clips, side-by-side and ask students to sketch an energy profile diagram to represent what was happening in each.

Reaction A	Reaction B
Reaction C	Reaction D

Making Posters Interactive with ThingLink

Making posters is a tried-and-trusted activity that students enjoy and is ideal for review of a topic, consolidation of ideas or just allowing a student greater freedom over how they present their work.

Both an advantage and a possible drawback of posters are the fact that limited information can be conveyed - so why not make the poster interactive to allow a topic to be explored in greater detail, or how about adding audio and/or video to your poster! You can achieve this, for FREE, using ThingLink!


With ThingLink you can quickly and easily create accounts for students by copying and pasting in your class list - you can even group them into classes. For each class you can have one or more 'channels' to keep images organised.
As part of the review from a recent test I had students work through their test paper with a RAG self-analysis sheet. Once they had identified an area to target for improvement they were then tasked with creating a poster on that topic, using text books and their own notes to help them. Once completed I photographed each poster and added them to a channel for that group - named 'Poster Photos' - this would allow students to find their own poster quickly and easily.

Once students have located their poster they can 'remix' the image to add it to their account and then add a series of tags to the image. I then had students add their remixed poster to a second channel - 'Interactive Posters'. This effectively allows students to submit their work to me but also keeps all of the completed work in one place. I can then publish the link to this channel on Moodle so all of the interactive posters are available for students for revision.

Finally, the ThingLink interactive images work well on phones and tablets so why not create QR codes for the best posters to stick on to the original paper copy when you put it up in your classroom?

Creating 'interactive worksheets'

Here is the exemplar from my session on using QR codes in learning resources, creating 'interactive worksheets'.

Getting Started with Moodle

The first instructional video for Moodle is out! We start of with the basics of configuring course settings, naming and organising course sections and uploading files.

QR codes

What is a QR code?

The short answer is that a QR code is like a barcode that can be scanned by a smartphone and contains information, usually a web link. For a more detailed answer to this, see whatisaqrcode.co.uk

Why would I want to use a QR code?

Any time you want to be able to easily share a piece of electronic information with a smartphone user really. What I tend to use these for is sharing links (URLs) to video clips on YouTube or providing hints or additional background information for support or for extension to tasks and QR codes are an ideal way to do this. Not every student will have access to a suitable device but at WGSB the ratio appears to be somewhere between 1 in 5 to 1 in 2 students (from Year 7 -13) from my observations so small groups sharing a device is likely to work without a problem.

In my classrooms I tend to have a projector (although for the most part visibility is far from optimal) and most of the time, working speakers and I may want to show a short video clip for a starter or a longer clip that students will answer questions on in a longer activity. I show the clip once or maybe twice to the whole class but some students will not have taken everything in and will need or want to watch the clip again. Why not let them do so on their own device so they can watch just the bits they need to, as many times as they need to?

How do I go about using a QR code?

Let's look at an example: I recently put together an activity for a Year 7 lesson on the greenhouse effect and global warming. I found an excellent YouTube clip that I wanted to set questions based on.

I posted the link on Moodle so I, my colleagues and our students can all easily find this both in the lesson and later on if needed, the short link (found using the 'Share' option on YouTube) is http://youtu.be/HK8LLWSIIm4. This is worth including in your resource so students without the ability to scan a QR code have the option of typing in a short URL instead. To generate the QR code I visit a free generation service such as QRStuff.com and paste the URL for my YouTube clip into the relevant box, click 'generate' if required (not on qrstuff) then preferably try scanning the code onscreen to test it. Here's my QR code:

Download the image (give it a sensible name!) and you can then Insert the image into your worksheet or handout in the same way you'd insert any other image. The images can be pretty small but should have some clear space around them. Older and cheaper phones won't have brilliant cameras so could struggle if you make the image too small. If you have a long URL the QR code will be more complicated and will be harder to scan so consider using a URL shortener such as Google's offering or the 'qrs.ly' service offered by QRStuff (both are free). I've shared my example worksheet through Dropbox and you can get the file here to see how it looks