Create Video Playlists to Enrich Learning with Embedr.com

Innovative educators know that for many video has edged ahead of other platforms as the number 1 tool.or learning, creating, and showing evidence of learning. Want to know how to do something? Simply go to Google and do a video search. You'll instantly have a plethora of videos showing you how to do that "thing" and in most cases you'll even have the ability to write to the video's author. Or, you can make a video asking people how to do a thing, like this student does here.

Many educators have even finally succeeded in getting video sites unblocked in their schools, bringing to the attention of those who were blocking that doing so was depriving students from meaningful learning opportunities.

As an educator fortunate to work in an environment where YouTube and other video sites are not blocked, I was trying to find an easy way to share videos relating to a particular topic, a playlist of videos if you will. In this case I was compiling this list of videos because I wanted to share with teachers some ways their students might make video projects for a class I was creating called “Flip My Class.” Some other reasons I might want to create such a playlist include because I want to:

1. Create a collection of videos to support a particular unit of study
2. Create a collection of videos for professional development where I wanted to share samples of videos on a topic created by other students.
3. Have students put a collection of videos together about a topic they are studying.
4. Have teachers put together a collection of videos to share with parents.
5. Put your favorite music videos in one place.

While there are a number of less-than-elegant ways to put such a collection together i.e. A bunch of videos on a blog post or website or wiki page that the viewer has to scroll through, not only is that not visually appealing, it is also not the easiest of methods if I wanted to encourage others to contribute to the playlist.

So, I turned to my personal learning network and thanks to the below tweet by bjackermann found Embedr.

bjackermann @InnovativeEdu Is this what you mean?? http://embedr.com/ Create video playlists & embed them anywhere

Embedr was everything I had hoped for. A terrific, elegant, and simple way to share a video playlist and a tool to which others could easily contribute. I wanted to create a way for teachers in an upcoming class to create videos and store them on one playlist regardless of their preferred video upload site. I also wanted to put a sample collection of videos together to use during the professional development to inspire them. I was able to collect the videos in Embedr and here’s how they look.

Build your own custom video playlist at embedr.com

I was also wondering what kind of collections @bjackmann had so I asked her. Here’s what she tweeted:bjackermann @InnovativeEdu Here's one that I use for inservice for teachers - Web 2.0 Videos Playlist http://embedr.com/playlist/web-2-0_6

Wow. A terrific playlist to inspire participants prior to innovative PD. Here’s what it looks like:

Build your own custom video playlist at embedr.com

Embedr.com has great potential and I’m excited to begin incorporating it into my professional development. How might you use this tool?