Recording and Editing Video

Generating video content is a great way to engage your students when they're not right in front of you. Luckily, it's also easy to do.

RECORDING VIDEO

If you want to share video with a Canvas courses and you don't need to record anything but a webcam feed, you can just use the browser-based video recorder built into the content editor in Canvas already. It's super simple - just look for the "Record/Upload Media" button in the toolbar anywhere Canvas' rich content editor is used (Assignments, Announcements, Pages, etc.) For more infor, check out the instructions at the beginning of this slide deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/178cLgaoeqIXRT5EWwI99xI9ho0aY5zQ0PyYWIsd2ofU/edit#slide=id.g814cf3eb13_1_3

If you don't have direct access to those Canvas courses, though, that tool won't help you. In that case, you might want to make use of the YouTube app on a phone. It's a really good option given the camera quality on phones nowadays and if you want to be mobile. Even if you don't have good cell service wherever you are, you can record the video using your phone's normal camera app (which doesn't require an internet connection) and then use the YouTube app to upload the video later when you're connected again. Once the video is at YouTube, you can just share the link to it however you like to whomever you like. A quick walk-through of recording and uploading via the YouTube app is in the "Quick Tech Videos" section of this site (link in the menu to the left).

YouTube TIP: set the privacy of the video to "Unlisted" and people won't be able to search YouTube for your video, but those you send links to will be able to see it.

A third option would be to use one of the free video recording websites, like the dead-simple cam-recorder.com or webcamera.io (ignore the ads on the sides of that second one. These sites record client-side, not server-side, which means they don't transfer your video anywhere - they just record directly to your local browser running on your computer. They both then offer the ability to "download" the video once it's recorded, which is kind of a silly thing to say since the video isn't actually anywhere else. Needless to say, the "downloading" is pretty instantaneous. Once you have the file, you can do whatever you want with it: upload to Google Drive, YouTube, etc.

For recording the desktop and windows of your computer, Loom is the recommended tool. You can find it at loom.com and the free version is good for most anything you'll need. When you're done with the recording, it will upload and process on Loom's servers and when it's ready, you can download it and save it to Google Drive to be able to share it out as you need.

EDITING VIDEO

Our preferred universal video editing tool is the web app, WeVideo. It's completely browser-based, can use Google Drive for storage, supports collaborative video projects, and MVS can supply licenses to you and/or your classes. If you'd like to learn more about WeVideo, email techsupport@mvschool.com.

If given a WeVideo registration link by MVSIT, choose "join with a new account" (unless you already have a personal WeVideo account - in which case, why are you using one of our licenses? ;), then make sure to choose Google in the "sign up with" section of the following page.

Once signed in with Google (which may happen automatically if you are already signed into another G Suite service), you'll be shown a sign-up confirmation page that should look something like this:

Note that it will show your email address, not Chuck Student's and it should show that you're a "member of" The Miami Valley School and that you won't be charged.

If any of these steps doesn't lead where expected, please reach out to MVSIT.