Splicd is a website that allows you to view any YouTube video on your IWB, but overcomes three common problems with using YouTube in the classroom:
1. YouTube is blocked on some school systems
2. You may just want to show a portion of a video and it’s difficult to get to the right point.
3. The video you’ve chosen is appropriate for the classroom, but user comments or related videos (displayed on the page) are not.
Splicd lets you paste the URL of a YouTube video, and then choose the start and end point. You can then link directly to that video (or download it with RealPlayer – see a previous post on this) and watch only the segment you want. There are a few ads but I haven’t seen any that are inappropriate.
Here’s an example of how you might use the service. You would like to show a section of ‘The Godfather’ which includes a traditional Roman Catholic christening. Unfortunately, the YouTube clip also shows the planning of a mob murder! Here’s the clip on YouTube:
And here’s the clip on Splicd, only showing the clip from 1:50 to 2:18 (sans mob murder)
EDIT: unfortunately, embedding the clip in my blog means that it keeps playing after 2.18. It won’t do this when you use it within Splicd.
You can still view the entire clip by linking from Splicd, so it’s not safe for students to use unsupervised. But it’s a useful workaround for using YouTube with the whole class.
