Header Ads

5 Important Tips on How to Better Annotate YouTube Videos to Use with Your Students

November 5, 2015
YouTube video editor is absolutely a powerful video editing platform to use in your instruction to create and edit videos. It provides almost all the pro features you normally find in a premium video software and all for free. Our YouTube for Teachers series here in EdTech and mLearning attempts to help teachers make the best of YouTube in their teaching by providing them with educational channels designed specifically to tend to teachers educational video content as well as resources featuring  tips and tricks on how to create and edit  instructional videos on Youtube. In today’s post we are introducing you to a very important feature called annotations.


Annotations are those pieces of information that you add to a video in the form of layered text, links and hotspots. As a teacher, you can use annotations to make your videos more interactive, engaging and informative.  YouTube offers five different types of annotations to choose from:

'A- Speech bubble: for creating pop-up speech bubbles with text.
B- Spotlight:  for highlighting areas in a video; when the user moves the mouse over these areas the text you enter will appear.
C- Note:  for creating pop-up boxes containing text.
D- Title: for creating a text overlay to title your video.
E- Label: for creating a label to call out and name a specific part of your video.'

1- Creating annotations
Here is how to access annotations and add them to your videos:
  • 'Go to your channel Video Manager
  • Next to the video you wish to edit, click the down arrow to the right of the Edit button and select Annotations
  • Click the Add annotation button on the right.
  • Click Apply changes when you've finished creating your annotations.'

2- Change font, colours, size and position
Using the annotations setting will enable you to customize the size, font, colour and background of your annotations. You can easily drag and drop to place your annotations on any spot within the video player. However, keep in mind that annotations have a limited size and are not allowed to cover over 30% of the player size.

Each annotation type comes with a bunch of setting options to choose from. First select the annotation form you want to use on your video, and you will be shown the available customization options right under it.



3- Change the timing of your annotations
You can easily control when your annotations appear on your video by changing the values in the Start and End settings. Alternatively, you can move the annotations around on the timeline underneath the video to the time spot where you want them to appear.



4-Add links to your videos
Using the linking feature allows you to link to other sources (e.g another video, a website, a blog...etc) right from within your video. Upon clicking on the embedded links, viewers will be directed to the resource page you linked to.



To add links to your video you need to check the ‘Link’ box underneath the ’Start’ and End’ settings. Paste the URL of your link and determine when you want it to appear in the video by customizing the values in from of ’Start link video at’. You can also check ‘Open link in a new window’ to enable viewers to access your linked page in a different window.

Source: YouTube Help.

No comments:

Powered by Blogger.