One of the things I always enjoy is watching students produce rather than consume media.

Below are my go to list of tools for a quick bit of audio editing, video editing, or image editing.  These are not the tools for major media production for that I have the Adobe Creative Cloud suite but for everyday quick items and working with students who just need to “Get it Done” these are the tools I use.

Audio Tools:

1 – https://twistedwave.com/ – Twisted Wave has both apps for mobile and a web based.  The app is only $10 and quite worth the price.  The cloud-based solution can do a five minute audio for free which is enough for many applications.

2 – http://www.audacityteam.org/ – Audacity is my goto tool for quick audio edits on the laptop.  Easy to use and completely free.

3 – http://bossjockstudio.com/ – Boss Jock Studio is my favorite application for helping students produce audio content on the iPhone or iPad.  The software allows you to load audio artifacts in and then record in one take a “live” session where those audio artifacts such as intro music can be used easily.

Video Tools:

There are the obvious video players such as iMovie and Windows Movie Maker.  I have had a great amount of success with the following:

1 – https://www.screencastify.com/ – Screencastify is a chrome plugin which also means the tool can be used on a Chromebook.  I have used screencastify in much the same way I had been using Jing on my laptop.  Quick videos and screen captures for specific student questions.

2 – https://www.wevideo.com/ – I almost always turn to iMovie for iOS, it is just that easy.  Recently though I found myself using weVideo on a Chromebook and was blown away with the collaboration features in the software.  While not every school will have the resources to subscribe to the full weVideo it is certainly worth a closer look.  It feels like the Google Docs of Video Editing for both its cloud storage and its built-in collaboration tools.

3 – https://spark.adobe.com/ – Adobe Spark has three components, it work on the mobile operating systems as well as on the web and on a Chromebook.  The Adobe Spark Video tool is quite easy to use and allows students to quickly put together a video presentation in just a few minutes.

4 – https://www.apple.com/keynote/ – It can be easy to forget that Apple’s Keynote offers the ability to record a presentation.  The interface makes is wonderfully easy for students to record a video of their presentation without needing to be on camera.  They can narrate their presentation and export it as a movie file.

Still image tools:

1 – https://spark.adobe.com/ – As with the video tool the adobe spark image tool called Adobe Spark Post is my new favorite image editing tool.  It is quick and easy to develop text overlaid images.  The tool can also be used to create excellent presentation slides and covers as well.

2 – https://www.canva.com/ – Not far from my heart is Canva, Canva offers a tool similar to Adobe Spark and has been around longer.  The tool is easy to use and recommended for the same types of quick projects.

3 – https://www.autodraw.com/ – Auto Draw is an interesting tool that can help rapidly illustrate concepts for a variety of purposes.  I have seen it used to make quick slides of original content as well as cover pages for reports.  The tool uses artificial intelligence to try and identify what users are drawing and then presenting a selection of images that can be substituted.

4 – https://drawings.google.com – within Google Drive is the ability to create a google drawing.  Google Draw is a simple editor that allows for seamless integration and collaboration but I must confess that since starting to use Canva and Adobe Spark I haven’t used Google Draw once.

5 – https://slides.google.com – Google Slides offers much the same in the way of basic image manipulation as does google drawings.  The advantage is that if you are going to be creating a presentation as your product the tool is an excellent choice.

Distribution:

In most cases, the distribution of the content will happen in one of three ways.  As a link in an email/announcement, being embedded within the learning management software, or being embedded on a web page such as a google site or WordPress site.

But where can the large media file live?  There are a few choices.

1 – https://spark.adobe.com/ – One of the things that I have been liking more about Adobe Spark these days has to do with distribution.  Meaning that each of the Adobe Spark apps has built in hosting for your products.  These can be easily embedded into your final projects or downloaded.  But free hosting for project files can be helpful.

2 – http://YouTube.com – For distribution to the public at large or embedding on your sites Youtube is still one of the best sites to do so on.  Assuming YouTube isn’t blocked for your students.

3 – http://Vimeo.com – Vimeo is an alternative to Youtube that can be quite helpful for schools where Youtube is blocked.

4 – http://TeacherTube.com – Teachertube is a video hosting alternative for schools that may find the most video hosting sites blocked.

5 – http://drive.google.com – For smaller distributions or files that you may see yourself updating more often Google Drive offers an opportunity to host and to share multimedia files in a way that is also easier to embed in other Google products such as a Google site or presentation.