Category Archives: Teachers

Adobe Captivate & Adobe Presenter

To truly create e-learning content that is meaniful and lasting you will need to utilise applications that are a bit more powerful than general apps. Two programs like this are Adobe’s Captivate and Presenter. Even though both of these programs have huge scope and posibilities, they have many levels of user ability and very easy to use entry levels.

Adobe Presenter allows you to take a PowerPoint presentation and add in interactivity, create quizes, monitor learning and much more. Watch the short video below to learn some of it’s capabilities.

With very little instruction you will be able to create effective e-learning content that can be accessed on any manner of devices.

Taking this e-learning content creation further, we move to Captivate. At first glance Presenter and Captivate may appear similar, however Captivate also allows you to capture screen content to create simulations and instructional videos.

To better understand how Captivate can be used by educators watch these series of videos below.

For any educator who wants to engage their students and create meaningful learning experiences I would whole-heartedly recommend getting a hold of Captivate and/or Presenter and to start using it this year. If you need some further guidance in using either of these programs you can find some more tutorials here:

Finally, for those of you who do want to learn much more about Captivate right away here are a series of videos that explore most of its capabilities in depth.

Saving YouTube (and other videos)

At some point, we’ll all experience being sucked into the black hole that is YouTube. Minutes or hours can go by as you browse through videos uploaded by everyday people like you and me. Some are funny, others useful, or (believe it or not) thought-provoking. The problem is that often you will find an amazing educational resource and then when you go to show it to your class either:

a) the link has disappeared
b) the video takes too long to load and keeps ‘buffering’
c) the school’s Internet/network is not working.

The smarter way to operate is to download a version of the video file and store it locally so that you always have access.

Before I continue, note that policies for the many video Web sites vary, so review those policies and move forward at your own risk. Distributing copyrighted material without authorization is illegal in Australia and many other countries. I do not encourage or condone the illegal duplication or distribution of copyrighted content. Before copying or distributing any content online, make sure you have the legal right to do so.

Keeping that in mind, here are two websites that let you download video from just about any video-sharing site.

Clip_Converter

Clip Converter is a free online media conversion application, which allows you to record, convert and download nearly any audio or video URL to common formats. Currently supported services: YouTube (HQ, HD, 4K), Vimeo and many more. This free and fast converter allows you to save lesson resources so they are available when you need them.

One note of caution, although this is an excellent site for converting and saving video some of the advertisments placed in the sidebars of this site are ‘questionable’ so use some discretion when you are visiting this site.

KeepVid

KeepVid Video Downloader is a free web application that allows you to download videos from sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitch.Tv, Vimeo, Dailymotion and many more. All you need is the URL of the page that has the video you want to download. Enter it in their textbox and simply click ‘Download‘. KeepVid will then fetch download links in all possible formats that the particular site provides. KeepVid is a little bit more cumbersome but it is a good backup plan if Clip Converter is not getting results.