This is a guest blog from Kristin Daddario, a 1st grade teacher at Lincoln Edison Charter School in York. We would love to hear about your newest technology discoveries and how you apply them to your classroom.
As a teacher, I am always looking for fun and engaging ways to introduce new topics and get my students excited about what we are learning. Have you ever found a really cool video at home that would be perfect for your new unit, and couldn’t wait to show your class? You get to your classroom and just as you go to play it, the site is blocked!! UGH!!! Although I continue to “bug” the tech team to unblock my favorite sites, I have found an easy and temporary fix to this problem!!! Mediaconverter.org is a great way to show all your exciting videos, and it is super easy!! Just follow these 5 easy steps, and you will be on your way!!!
1. Go to the video(s) you would like to convert- I prefer YouTube videos, but they can come from any site!
2. Once there, right click and copy the URL - if you want better quality in your video add (&fmt=18) to the end of your URL
3. Go to www.mediaconverter.org
4. Once there, click on “Enter a Link”, where you will right click and paste your URL you copied. Click “OK” and this will bring you back to the original screen, where you started. Here you may enter more links by repeating the above steps, or click on “Go to the next step”.
5. Once you click on “Go to the next step”, you will choose your output file as “avi” and then click “OK”. This will bring you to a summary page, where you will click start to begin converting your videos. Once finished, you will get a notification that the conversion is done, where you can click download, next to your video! (If you are converting more than 1 video, it is better to download 1 video at a time)Happy Converting!
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ReplyDeleteThis is such a stress reliever for all those teachers who can't get accesss to youtube. Converting videos also keeps the video safe. What is &fmt=18? and why does it make the video a better quality? Thank you for the ideas.
ReplyDeleteThis is great to know! I think this will prove very useful as I totally understand the frustration of having the dreaded "BLOCK" happen in class! I have come across some FANTASTIC how-to videos for different projects I do & it will be so easy to share them with my classes now knowing this. Thanks!
ReplyDelete~Kelly
Thank you for posting about this, so that I always have a place to check in case I forget (like I might over the summer, for example).
ReplyDeleteSince YouTube isn't blocked for me, but it is for my students, I ran into the trouble of posting a YouTube video link on my Moodle site, which looks great when I show it on my computer to the class, but when they try to see it on a classroom student laptop, it is blocked. A way around this is videopure.com. It works similarly to mediaconverter. One of my files kept stalling in mediaconverter and worked on videopure. Just a thought in case others run into that trouble too.
Katie
OOPS! I just looked back at the website and saw that I typed the wrong thing. The site I meant to reference is viewpure.com! Sorry!
DeleteKatie
Using converting websites like that is so helpful in so many ways. Wireless just came to my building this year, so previously I had to save videos to my laptop before I brought it over and hooked it up to the projector. Additionally, PPT presentation I have done at various locations can't always guarentee an internet connection. Having a saved copy on my flashdrive has saved me life more than once.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tips!
Joanna
Kristin, What a great way to get around your schools' system! Our school system is opened for educators and I can find most information easily. Unfortunately this will only be useful if you know the video ahead of time, but hey- it's better than nothing! I'm sure this has really changed the way you approached lessons! I'm sure this is something that your colleagues would find very beneficial as well!
ReplyDeleteKatlyn