TurboNote is a great Chrome extension that lets you take time-stamped notes while watching videos on YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, and many other video sharing sites. I was immediately impressed by TurboNote when I reviewed it last month. This week TurboNote released two great updates. Those updates feature transcript search and synced viewing.

In the updated version of TurboNote you can invite other TurboNote users to take notes with you in real-time. To do this you create a TurboNote “event” (a nice name for a chat room) then invite others to join by sending them the link to your event. Once people have joined your TurboNote event you can can sync the video time to watch videos at the same pace. You can then chat about the video in real-time.

The transcript search feature in TurboNote is a beta feature that currently works only on YouTube videos that have captions enabled. On those videos TurboNote can be used to search the transcript of the captions to find specific points in the videos according to keywords.

Applications for Education

The new synced viewing option in TurboNote could be a good option for students to use to take notes together while watching a short video lecture like a TED Talk. The transcript search function could be helpful in locating a key point in that same TED Talk video.