After our success last week with videos for news reports, we have looked to other ways of editing and playing with video online. Offline we were fairly limited to an old version of Windows Movie Maker, but on the web, we suddenly have loads of (free!!) tools to pick from.

Miles Berry (@mberry) suggested remixing videos using Popcorn Maker (https://popcorn.webmaker.org/) which is a free site to use. We had a bit of problem signing the children up but I think this was probably down to our email settings rather than the Popcorn site, so the children all logged in using my log-in. We worked in pairs and had 16 pairs using the same log-in with no difficulty.

The basic concept of the site is to find a YouTube (or Vimeo/HTML 5) video, add it to the timeline and then while it plays, add pop-ups, text, images and multimedia content.

This is an example from two Year 3 girls (note, they haven’t done a huge amount but it gives a small flavour):

We were basing this on our India topic and we were looking at the River Ganges. For this, we all used the same two videos to make it a bit easier, technically. Then, the pairs had to research facts and information about the river and add it to their video. Now, some have spelling mistakes, some are slightly inaccurate (the river is 2,500km and not 2,500m long!) but in an hour, we have produced some great work.

This was all fairly simple to do and within minutes the children were happily adding maps of Varanasi and pop-ups to their video. Once done, they simply saved it and it gives them an embed code and a URL to share them on a blog or website.

Francesca and Issy then went and added the videos to their own blogs too!

The next step is to finish the videos and publish them onto the class blog. The children have already started to suggest other ways to remix videos in other lessons. I think maths methods might be the next one…