Simple ways to caption: Camtasia

If you are fortunate enough to have a copy of Camtasia from TechSmith, you can use that to make your videos accessible to all with captioning.  The software is about $300 for a copy, but, it's worth it. I have used it for several video projects and the outcome is very professional.

The people at Techsmith have established excellent tutorials for their product and there is a section devoted to captioning.  It has a speech to text capability, syncing with a script as well as manual caption editing.

Techsmith does have a free trial of the software to see how to use it and if you want to buy it. I encourage you to download it and make a video lesson. Don't forget your captions, they are a very important step to making a video accessible for students who need to read subtitles instead of just listening.

Simple ways to caption: iMovie

I have talked a few times lately about captioning video to make them accessible for all learners.   I am not a Mac user, but, iMovie is built into each Mac computer and it can be used to caption videos.   I saw it done at a conference recently, and it looked fairly simple to do.   Apple has made a whitepaper with directions on how to do this.  You can find one by clicking this link.

I think it is important to remember that all students need to be able to have accessible videos.  Not all students can learn my merely hearing, some need to read that is spoken to them.  Captioning is a simple step that will benefit your students.

iMovie does take a little longer to caption than using YouTube, but, it can be done prior to the upload and be built in directly to the video. One step that is different than editing captions in YouTube is the direct typing of word for word content.   YouTube does find the content for you and you just edit. With iMovie, you will have to type as you listen.  The steps are a little extra, but it is worth it in the end.

Simple ways to caption: Movie Maker

When it comes to accessibility, captioning is by far one of the best ways to make a flipped classroom an accessible classroom to many learners.   Microsoft Movie Maker has the capability of placing captions over video clips to help the visual learner.   I have located a tutorial on Microsoft's website that explains the process of using Movie Maker's title/ credit component. You merely place the credit over the video.  You can see the tutorial here.

I have used Movie Maker often for putting together tutorials for students and staff. It is an easy program to use and the fact that it is free makes it even better. It is available on every PC computer and if it doesn't appear, it can be downloaded to your Windows PC.  It isn't compatible with an IOs system.

There are several good tutorials for Movie Maker in general on YouTube as well.  It's worth looking into.

Simple ways to caption videos: YouTube

I recently went to a training for technology leadership certification and one of the things we talked about for a great amount of time was accessibility for all students. 

I've decided I'm going to take a little bit of time to talk about captioning because that is one of the ways to make things accessible for students.  There are so many teachers flipping their classes, but do they realize that not all kids can follow the aural cues and watch the video along side?   Some of them need to have their videos captioned because they learn better by reading than merely listening. I want to take a little time today to show you how to use YouTube to caption.  I have found this is one of the easiest ways to make it work. 

1. First of all, if you have a video uploaded to YouTube, captioning is simple.  Follow these steps:

1. Open your YouTube video manager where you see the list of YouTube videos.

2. Choose the video you plan to edit and click Subtitles and caption from the Edit pull down menu.

2. 3. Choose English as the original language of the video and it will regenerate a page that has the 4th image on it, When you click the English that has a green dot next to it, you will see a page of text generate.  This is your captioning.   

4.  You need to click the edit button and it will permit you to change the text to what it needs to be.  Sometimes, text is generated that doesn't make perfect sense, but with a few keystrokes, you can change it to make it correct.  Hearing impaired will tell you they need to just get the gist and not the entire context.  Another note:  You may want to add cues that relate to the sounds as well. (applause, music, laughter) as this helps the hearing impaired understand why there is no captioning for a long period of time.

5.  Once you have edited the text that came in, you merely publish it and then you will notice that the video has text the next time it is played.

This is a free service and really doesn't take that long to complete.  You will be able to help many students who learn better from words than audio.  It is a great way to meet the accessibility needs of all students.

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Google Talk to Type on Blogger: It can be done

        I wanted to test and see if I could actually do a blog post in Blogger using Google Talk to Type. I was actually surprised to see that what I typed was what I said which tells me that this is another accessibility tool that teachers can be using with their students. 

        I can see it being used especially for students who have a lot of trouble writing and typing and getting their words across. There are some kids out there, who are able to talk and get the point across a lot better than type or write. Sometimes their handwriting is hard to read or they are physically unable to write as much due to a disability.
        If you, as a teacher, may decide to have your students do blog posts or do writing prompts of some sort you can actually set them up in Blogger to do this.  The students who have trouble sharing their thoughts and making them fluid could actually talk and then let it type what they have to say. I agree, it's possible, that you will have things that are little unorganized but you will actually have more content coming from the students when they talk to type.
       I can actually see this talk to type accessibility being used and a lot of different classrooms. If a student has trouble taking notes in a classroom, the teacher could use talk to type and let the student take notes that way and actually record word for word what the teacher says as a later tool to refer to when it comes to taking a test. This would work perfectly for those times when an instructional assistant is not available to go into the classroom with a special needs student. 

       The teacher can actually record himself or herself doing the notes and the special education student could refer to the notes with the resource room staff as a review.  One of the things we did discover, is that if you are using a foreign language this Google Talk to type does not work as well and it is very inaccurate. I would not recommend using it in a foreign language class as a way of helping students do better because what you're going to see come up is not actual factual information.

        I did have to go back to the actual post and edit a little, add punctuation and check the spelling of a few words before I was able to publish it, but, as a means of offering assitance to that kid who isn't a good writer or isn't a good speller, this is a fantastic tool. It can do a lot to help students study, review and assure they are taking good notes as well.