Why download?

Even if you have online access in the classroom, it is worth downloading or ‘capturing’ the clips that you want to use with your students. Here are six reasons for doing so:

1. Technology can go wrong. You might find that your online classroom connection is down or slow.

2. When you download a video from YouTube, you are able to rename it. This can be important when it is undesirable for students to see the title of a clip. For example, imagine you are doing a ‘What happens next?‘ activity with this video. If your students see that it is called ‘Baby panda sneeze‘, then the activity will be ruined.

3. When using captured clips, we don’t have to wait for them to downstream (i.e. we don’t have to wait for the red bar under the screen to move to the right hand side).

4. On YouTube and other video sharing sites, it can be notoriously difficult to move the slider (i.e. the little round marker underneath the screen) to specific moments in clips. This can be annoying when you want to replay a short section of a clip for your students (for example if you wanted to use a song on YouTube to play Song Hangman). Downloaded clips are usually much easier to manage in this respect.

5. If you have iTunes, you can build up a library of downloaded clips which is easy to use and very quick to navigate. In addition, once you have a clip on your iTunes, it can be transferred to your iPod and this can be a good display medium for one-to-ones and very small classes. A posting on these points will follow.

6. Finally (and I have to admit that I’m not completely sure about this one), by downloading clips and then watching them offline, we can avoid contributing to the the up-and-coming problem of the ‘Internet Crunch‘.

How to download clips

1. Find a YouTube clip that you want to capture and copy the URL (i.e. the website address)

2. Go to www.savevid.com, and paste the URL into the window and click on DOWNLOAD

3. Once the screen display changes, click on Download mp4

4. You will now be given the option to Save to Disk. Select this and click on OK.

5. Once the download is complete, you will find a file titled video.mp4 on your desktop. You can rename this, open it and watch it in full-screen mode.

There are dozens of other similar sites that can be used for the same purpose but I have found savevid.com to be the best for the following reasons:

1. It is free
2. The user is not required to download any additional components that are necessary for the process
3. The user is not required to give an email address
4. It is quick
5. The visual quality of the resulting mp4 files is good
6. It can also be used to capture videos from Dailymotion, Metacafe, Break, Veoh, MySpace, Revver, Spike, Blip.tv, and WeGame

Please add a comment below if you have any additional questions.

Posted by admin on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 at 12:11 am.