For the last few weeks I’ve been posting on Twitter and on Facebook videos based on blog posts that I have written. To do that I have been using a service called Lumen5. Lumen5 is a service that will produce a video for you based upon your written work.

To create a video with Lumen5 you can enter the URL of your published work or paste in the text of your blog post. Lumen5 will then select highlights from your writing to feature in a video. The video will always begin with the title of your blog post. From there it will use any subheadings or section headings that you have in your blog post to create sections of your video. If you don’t have subheadings or section headings in your blog post, Lumen5 will attempt to pull the keywords or phrases from each paragraph.

Lumen5 generates a preview of a video for you based on the title, keywords, and key phrases in your blog post. The video will consist of images and video clips matched to the words in your blog post. If you don’t like the words or images that Lumen5 chose for you, you can edit the words and swap the images and video clips with others from Lumen5’s huge media library. Finally, once you are happy with the visuals of your video you can pick a free audio track to use in your video.

Completed Lumen5 projects can be shared directly to Facebook. You can also download your video to use on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and anywhere else that you like post short videos.

Applications for Education
If you have been writing blog posts or newsletters and you feel like none of your students or parents are reading them, try turning those posts or newsletters into a short video. You can’t include every word of the post or newsletter, but you can include the highlights which be enough to entice students and parents to read the full text of your post or newsletter.