YouTube can be a great place to find educational videos to use in your classroom. But YouTube isn’t the only place where you can find good educational video content. These services will allow you to organize playlists from multiple video sharing services. Please note that if YouTube is blocked in your school, the only tool in this list that will provide a work around for you is Miro. Click here for a list of alternatives to YouTube.
Miro is an open source media player available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. With Miro installed on your computer you can search for, watch, listen to, and download media. You can search multiple video sources including YouTube and Hulu within the Miro player. When you find a video that you like, you can download it and store it in the Miro player. If you choose to allow it, Miro can search your computer for existing media files to add to your Miro player. The Miro player can also be synced with your Android device. The latest version of Miro has the capability to stream between devices over a local network.
Squrl is a free service that allows you to create a playlist of videos from sources all over the web. Rather than creating playlists on individual video sites like YouTube and Vimeo, you can create playlists from multiple sources and save them in one place for sharing with others and viewing at your convenience.
The Squrl iPad app has the same basic purpose as the Squrl web service. You can discover and watch videos from many sources. Your playlists can be shared with your contacts in your favorite social networks like Twitter and Facebook.
Yokto is a service that allows you to collect videos from multiple sources and display them in one player on your website. As you might expect you can gather videos from YouTube, but you can also gather videos from sources like Vimeo, Blip, UStream, and Slideshare. The videos that you gather can be played through the Yokto video player embedded into your website. Yokto operates on a freemium business model. That means that the basic Yokto functions of gather videos and displaying them through the Yokto player is free, but there are additional options you can purchase. Some of the additional options are customizable video players and hosting of your own videos.
Plizy is a service that allows you to browse for and save videos to playback later on your iPad or Android tablet. Plizy has many video channels to choose from. If the videos you see in default Plizy channels are not to your liking, you can create your own custom channels. Unlike some apps that only pull content from YouTube, Plizy pulls content from many popular sources including TED, National Geographic, and CNET. To get started using Plizy you do need to install either the iPad app or the Android app. After installing the app you can register for Plizy through the app.
Chill is a free service for creating and sharing collections of your favorite videos from YouTube, Vimeo, VEVO, and Hulu. Chill is kind of like Pinterest for videos. Using Chill you can add videos with your comments to categories that you create. Your videos appear like sticky notes on a wall. Chill allows you to follow other Chill users to discover and share new videos.
