Adobe Voice in the Classroom

If you’ve been excited at the idea of making  videos for and with your class, but overwhelmed at the prospect of all of the production involved, look no further than Adobe Voice.

Animate on the Fly

Adobe Voice brilliantly lets you eliminate the need for pre-production and post-production by creating a simple app where everything you do is produced as you create it:

• Open the app
• Record what you want to say
• Add a relevant image
• Rinse, wash, repeat

It really is as simple as that. Let’s take a look:

Adobe Voice and PBL

Watching the video I’m sure your brain started buzzing with all of the Project Based Learning you can develop out through Adobe Voice. Simple videos like these can serve as an excellent alternative to speeches, short papers, or even presentations, depending on your learning objectives.

Here are a few ways you might consider using Adobe Voice:

• Biographies
• How-to videos
• Show-and-tell
• Recount a story
• Explain a concept
• Introduce a new subject
• Summarize a chapter
• Etc

Because of the simple and customizable nature of Adobe Voice, you can create videos around just about any topic you or your students can think of, and they can make adjustments to their videos without concern about making mistakes or “getting it perfect” the first time around.

Options to Share

Adobe Voice is easy to share, and you can give out links to the videos, share them via social media, or embed your videos directly in your website, like this:

Sharing is very easy and can be done directly inside of the app.

BONUS: Own Your Adobe Voice Video

While Adobe makes it fairly easy to share your videos through their platform, there are a number of reasons that you might want to might want to have the video that you made for your own. Unfortunately, Adobe Voice doesn’t give you access to the video file itself, so you may have to create some workarounds.

If you want to share outside of the Adobe Voice ecosystem, I’ve come up with a couple of simple “hacks” you can use to have access to your video.

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BONUS

The first way to get hold of your video file is to do what I did in the walkthrough video above. This would involve using Reflector to display your content from the iPad onto your computer, then using screen recording software like Jing to create your own recording of it.

Here are the two tutorials I created to help you through the process:
How to use Reflector:

Originally posted at:http://edtech.tv/turn-your-ipad-into-a-smartboard-without-an-apple-tv-reflector-tutorial/

How to use Jing:

Originally posted at: http://edtech.tv/jing-screencast-tutorial/

Potential Option #2 (SMARTER!)

The option I gave you above is kind of like taking a video of your TV. After playing around and got hit with the Obvious Hammer. Instead of recording a display of the video, why not just record it directly?

• Go to the link to your video provided by Adobe
• Play the video on the Adobe site
• Record (using Jing, Screencast-o-matic, Screenflow, or your recorder of choice) and have the video right away!

DOUBLE BONUS!

If you want to embed the Adobe Voice video on your site, the size may not match with your website. In order to re-adjust the size, take the following steps:

Go to the Adobe Voice webpage that you e-mailed to yourself, and click on “embed”:

When the code shows up, it will provide you with a width and height that is not the right size for your website:

Use an Aspect Ratio Calculator to determine the size you want.
Here is one you can use: http://andrew.hedges.name/experiments/aspect_ratio/

Replace the old height and width with the new height and width in the code:

Then you simply cut and paste the code into your website and you are done!

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I also want to give a special shout out to Melissa Minkin at TeacherHacks.net – I met Melissa at the last Los Angeles EdCamp and she inspired me to take a look at Adobe Voice again and to present my own take on it! Thanks Melissa!