High Tech Hangout - YouTube Video Editor

What is a High Tech Hangout?

A few years ago, I began hosting Google Hangout sessions where we discuss a specific techie tool over a video conference. I called it, "PD in PJ's." I thought it was a catchy title. It is so catchy that I've been noticing it popping up on the "Interwebz" quite a bit. Therefore, I decided to change the name of my online sessions. The whole point of using Hangouts was I wanted to provide a convenient manner for professional development. 

Attending after school sessions is tough. People have things to do and places to go. A Google Hangout provides the convenience of learning from your own living room. For my MSD of Steuben County staff, Friday, February 19th was a perfect opportunity as the teachers were at home while the students completing their schoolwork virtually. This is the first Google Hangout on Air that has been run with staff at MSD of Steuben. For many of the attendees, it was the first Google Hangout period. 

Launch!

I'm adding this section of the post for those interested in creating a Hangout on Air so that you can train, collaborate, and record the session. (Go ahead and skip it if you aren't interested in starting your own Hangout on Air.)

To launch this Hangout on Air, I went through YouTube and went to the Live Streaming section in the Creator Studio. A quick way to get to this point is to visit http://www.youtube.com/my_live_events. Once you schedule your event, you can come back to this page and start your Hangout. 

Once in the Hangout, I sent invitations to all those that indicated that they wanted to attend. It sent them an email invitation so that they only had to click on the link to participate. I gave 15 minutes advance notice in case any downloading was necessary on their device. The technical issues are usually the biggest problem with a Google Hangout. I encourage staff members to utilize a Chromebook because there are typically fewer technical issues with Hangouts and Chromebooks. A PC or Mac will work, but additional installations may be necessary. To help with the process, I gave teachers forewarning of message boxes that may appear when attempting to access the session. 

YouTube Video Editor

Friday's session was all about utilizing the YouTube Editor to trim video, add audio, and post annotations. The MSD of Steuben County staff has received quite a bit of training (and more to come) in regard to utilizing Screencastify to create video lessons. The whole purpose is to use video to give opportunities to personalize learning using the blended learning model. Sometimes the teachers want to be able to edit their videos. There is nothing more frustrating than making mistakes during your lesson that cause the teacher to completely start over. Fortunately, teachers can upload their videos from Screencastify straight to YouTube. This allows the teacher to trim off the parts where they made mistakes. In the long run, this can alleviate some of the frustrations a teacher may experience when attempting to create video lessons. 

Overall the session was a lot of fun. We had a few technical hiccups here and there, but I was able to cover the topic within an hour. I look forward to more opportunities to hold these sessions. So be looking out for alerts about future High Tech hangout sessions! 

For your convenience, I edited the entire session and cut it into seven different parts. I hope you find it helpful so you can skip directly to the parts you need when editing a video with YouTube. However, if you want to view the session in it entirety, you can click here to view it. Please note that I put the edited versions in a playlist. So you need to click on the  to view the entire list of videos.