Direct YouTube Downloader

Three Ways to Watch Videos & Discuss Them in Real-time Online YouTube can be a good place to find educational videos to support your lessons. We've all had students who struggle to hold their comments until the video has stopped. One strategy that many teachers have used in those cases is to tell students to "write it down." The web makes it possible to take that strategy a step further and have students not only "write it down" but also enable teachers to instantly respond to students' comments while watching a video. Synchtube is a free service for watching videos and chatting about them at the same time. Watch2gether is a neat site through which you can watch YouTube videos and host text chats about them at the same time. Google+ Hangouts provide the option to watch YouTube videos with a small group.

VideoANT - Collaboratively Annotate Videos VideoANT is a free tool for collaboratively annotating videos. I first wrote about VideoANT back in 2010. Recently, as I learned from Nathan Hall, VideoANT received a major facelift that makes it easier to use than it was before. The first improvement to note is that the service is now built on HTML5 which means that Flash is no longer needed. The second major improvement is improved ease of annotating videos. Using VideoANT anyone can add annotations to any publicly accessible YouTube video. Nathan Hall wrote a complete run-down of all of the features of VideoANT. Applications for Education In the past I've used back-channels while my students are watching videos so that they can discuss the footage as they're seeing it.