The most recent issue of Technology and Learning: Ideas and Tools for Ed Tech Leaders (January 2012) includes a wonderful list of their top one-hundred education websites for the classroom and beyond. While many of them are really intended for the K–12 audience, this list provides a few tools that could be of interest to instructors in Higher Ed. One in particular, a tool called EmbedPlus, seems particularly promising.

This free tool allows the user (with only the YouTube URL) to use the wizard to enhance the YouTube video by doing things like marking chapters, cropping videos, and providing the ability to view the video in slow motion.

A couple of the features that I see having real potential include the ability to annotate the video. See the example below:

Students or instructors can use this feature to provide commentary to videos. In the example above the annotated video could be embedded as the prompt in the discussion area of D2L and students could be asked to watch the video and respond to the questions posed in the video. Students could use this feature to annotate video examples demonstrating course concepts—for example the use of light in a film clip.

Another great feature is the ability to get “real-time reactions” on videos. For videos of current events and breaking news, these reactions can be used to stimulate conversation in classes. The “real-time reactions” currently come from Twitter feeds and YouTube comments. Take a look at an example from the Presidential primaries. To see the comments click on the Read icon in the bottom right-hand corner to see the comments.

I encourage folks to explore this site and see what applications you can think of. I believe this website fills a current void in the market allowing users to easily edit and share video. My hope is that more of these tools become available for other video sources (think TED videos) and that commercial providers of streaming content think about adding similar abilities to their own tool sets.