WeVideo

WeVideo is a great tool for creating videos. WeVideo offers you an educator classification, with a free day 30 day trial. During the free trial, WeVideo does place a watermark stamp on all created videos, which is a little frustrating, however it does create the video for you.

Upgrading to a paid account removes the water mark and gives you additional tools to use in creating your videos. For a personal account, WeVideo charges $4.99 monthly or you can purchase an unlimited membership for $7.99. The unlimited offeres a higher video definition, advanced marketing tools, and an unlimited number of videos published per month. The personal account allows you to publish 30 videos per month, but allows you access to the same number of songs, images, and special features that the unlimited subscription offers. Educators can purchase up to 30 users for $199 a year.

The aspect of WeVideo that first drew me to it was the fact that it can be added as an app to google chrome. You are able to sign in to the app with your google, facebook, yahoo, and Office365 login, which makes it useful for students who are likely to have a google log in. 

I love that you are able to invite others to collaborate with you on the project. Student teams can easily work on projects together and teachers can quickly view the projects to see where students are. 

As you can see above, the interface is fairly straightforward and user friendly. You upload your video, in this case, I added a video held in my google drive. It took about 5-10 minutes for the full video (4GB) to upload, which was much quicker than it took for the video to upload to my google drive. 

Once the video is in your account, you can open it to use in a new project. You drag the video down to the video bar and you can begin to manipulate it. If you had multiple clips to put together, you could put them in the same video line and splice them together. If videos are butted up against each other, they play without interruption. You can add audio to the clips in the audio bar beneath the video. WeVideo had a wide selection of audio clips to choose from or you can upload your own. 

In my case, I was taking a long video and dividing it to make smaller videos. You drag the blue playhead to the place you would like to divide and click on the scissors. You could then drag a different clip to that spot or you could highlight one of the divided sections and delete it from the video bar. 

Once the video is how you want it, you can click on finish to publish your video. You are prompted to create a name for the video. You can then choose how you want to publish it. In my case I wanted to publish it to my google drive so I could access it at a later point. Once it is published, you can download it to your computer and upload it anywhere you want. 

WeVideo would be a great way to have students create book trailers or finalize a research project by creating a historcal newshour or live coverage of an event. Students would enjoy using this and would be likely to use it on their own for personal uses.