Quickly Turn Articles Into Videos With InVideo
By Richard Byrne (Free Technology for Teachers)
This morning I was browsing Product Hunt when I saw a new product that was promoting itself as a way to create “insanely good social videos.” The service is called InVideo. While it is fairly easy to use to make audio slideshow-style videos, that’s not why I’m mentioning it today. The reason I’m mentioning it is that contains a feature to convert written articles into videos.
InVideo offers lots of tools and templates for making audio slideshow videos to share on social media and elsewhere. One of those tools lets you copy the text of an article into a template then have InVideo automatically select images to match the text of the article. A similar InVideo template lets you enter the URL of an article and have a video made with images that are automatically selected to make the text of the article. In both cases parts of the text appear on the slides with the images. And in both cases you can manually override the automatic image selections.
When your InVideo video is complete you can download it for free with a watermark applied to it. Alternatively, you can invite other people to join InVideo and the watermark is removed. Or you can purchase an InVideo subscription to have all watermarks removed.
Applications for Education
InVideo probably isn’t a tool that students can use because it does require a phone number in order to sign up. That said, it could be useful for teachers who want to provide their students with a visual summary of the key points of a long passage of text.
