There are a few different tools like Prezi, Adobe Spark, and WeVideo that I wanted to learn as part of my professional development and not just for the sake of this blog post, but I couldn’t get enough time to have my hands wet with all of them this week. I will try my best to gain some knowledge of these tools at some point in near future. For this post, in particular, I thought to talk about “Video Scribe” which I recently used for one of my other projects. I am not a pro in using it so far but hope to brush up my skills as I will use it more in the future. Following is my first scribe.
Overview:
It is to create your own Stunning, high-definition, whiteboard-style animation videos with no design or technical know-how.
VideoScribe is software for creating whiteboard animations automatically. It was launched in 2012 by UK company Sparkol. VideoScribe is developed in Adobe Flash and produces QuickTime movies and Flash videos. Video files can be exported to Quicktime video, Flash video or image sequences (JPEG or PNG).
In order to create my first Scribe, I learned to use this software by the following two YouTube tutorial Videos. There are more videos available online to get an in-depth knowledge of this software to be a pro but to a beginner, like me, these tutorials would definitely help to create the first Scribe.
Strengths:
- Transforms ideas into a video, a robust whiteboard software for creating engaging animated content to tell the story.
- The software is easy to use and no prior technical or design knowledge is required.
- The interface of this platform is very simple and a beginner can create professional videos in very less time.
- Video Scribes keep the audience engaged and captured.
- No difference between free trail version vs the paid version of the software, all the features are available in the free version to decide whether we want to purchase it or not.
- A neat and detailed software, hard things can be explained easily.
Weaknesses:
- The free trial is only for 7 days, after that, you have to pay $29/month or $198/year.
- A slow software for long videos as it takes too much time for rendering. (it took almost 8 to 10 minutes for my 15 minutes video to get a mp3 format of it. Also, it froze several times when I was editing my scribe.
- It has limited image library and supports only SVG files, I was trying to embed my own media (images and videos) but it was not working. (which was frustrating to me as I did not know how can I convert my media int the SVG format.)
- The time frame in the bottom shown is not that much user-friendly, I had a hard time rearranging my clips.
Potential for teachers’ use in the classroom:
- Teachers can engage students by teaching the lesson in the form of a visual and sequenced flow using Scribes. (I would say, it can be a video form of our lesson plans)
- Students can create scribes for their projects. They would not only be engaged in the project but it would also bring innovations in the classroom by using whiteboard technology.
- It provides logins for students, teachers and other staff members.
- Students can access it at school as well as at home.
Following video highlights a few good reasons for using a whiteboard tool like Video Scribe in education:
Anila Kanwal 
I absolutely LOVE Videoscribe. I used it for a final learning project in an ECS class. It takes time to use, but turns out so beautifully in the end. I think the combination of the visual and verbal presentation really strengthens a student’s output of ideas and makes it more easily accessible for others. Unfortunately, it is quite expensive, but I would highly suggest that everyone tries out the free trial! They certainly won’t regret it 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
April, Thanks for commenting on my post. No doubt it’s a great tool to learn and use.
LikeLike