Educators, Communicators and Storytellers: Start the year right!

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

Nelson Mandela

We believe Digital Natives will impact how we communicate and tell stories in the 21st century. That is why we are so passionate about working with youth in education. We are already seing how the young cloud-generation is adopting new ways of telling stories.

2013 was the year during which educators and students across the USA truly discovered WeVideo. WeVideo was mentioned in both the keynote speech and across a number of other presentations at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE)s annual conference last June. Since the conference the growth of the number of schools using WeVideo has greatly accelerated, now surpassing 5,000 schools in the USA alone.

Increased quality of youth stories This growth has been accompanied by an ever greater number of creative, smart and touching videos made by students across elementary, middle and high schools. Below we feature a story made by middle school students Chloe Slayter, Malia Simon, and Matthew Richardson from Paulding Middle School in California. You will be impressed, particularly with how the authenticity of their messages shines through their storytelling, and how creative they are in exploring the very contemporary topic of bullying with the use of video, language, and even face-painting. Seeing quality videos such as the below fully justifies all the years we have spent building WeVideo. Whereas before WeVideo youth storytellers never could have afforded access to dedicated editing equipment, or the significant investment of time required to master these tools, our easy-to-use cloud-based creation platform has opened up video storytelling to all kids.

We are giving todays youth the ability to tell their stories anywhere, anytime. In the process our students develop the multiliteracies and other 21st century skills needed to empower them to become global citizens.

WeVideo has been listening to your feedback WeVideo has evolved to meet the needs of storytellers, educators and other communicators around the world. Indeed the WeVideo service has been improved in 2013 with each of our monthly releases. We can confidently say that if you have not used WeVideo in a year and take a look today you will audibly say WOW. Here is how we have improved the service over the last year:

Administrative support:

Private and secure Walled Garden - Privacy is not only important to businesses, but also to public education. For example, many districts have strict usage policies on how student faces, names, etc. can be used online. In 2013 WeVideo introduced a private and secure Walled Garden for organizations where default behaviour only allows creators to share their own videos within the Walled Garden. In the Walled Garden only an administrator can authorize the publishing of a video to the outside world.

Enhanced multi-level account administration capabilities - We enhanced Administrator Controls by adding a control panel by which administrators can manage users, settings and permissions. We also added approval of final videos before viewing, as well as a Video Gallery for broader sharing of projects within a creators organization or school.

Simplified management and deployment in Google environments - Deployment of WeVideo in Google environments got a major overhaul in 2013. WeVideo now supports Google+ Single Sign-On (SSO), and can now automatically handle WeVideo permissioning based on information already in Google Admin. This capability allows IT adminstrators to provision users from Google Admin, and to keep all organization structures and user information updated and accessible in one place.

Editing:

Editing modes - We added Storyboard Editing Mode to supplement Timeline Editing Mode in order to give novice users with no editing experience an easy way to tell their stories. This adaptive interface allows creators to move seamlessly between three levels based on their experience and familiarity with video editing.

Themes - Another big achievement was the addition of One-Click Styling of videos, including grading, transitions, titles and lower thirds. WeVideo now comes with 26 unique high quality visual themes.

Auto-save - Don't worry about saving anymore: all video work is now automatically saved every 30 seconds after each action in the background.

Improved text handling - We added more creative text control, such as formatting, supported internationalized text input and the ability to add and remove title and end-clips. We are finalizing text handling with revamped advanced text and annotation being added at the end of this month.

Ken Burns and transformations - We completely redesigned the Ken Burns still-image effect from scratch, and made it a lot more user-friendly. We also added advanced transform controls that are now available in all editing modes. This allows you to crop, rotate and scale images and videos.

Multi-language support - We made our editor global by supporting eight languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Russian, Japanese and Arabic. More languages will come in 2014.

Inline Video Help - We brought more than fifty video tutorials inside the editor. You can now simply type in your issue and context-relevant help videos will be recommended.

Audio level control for Storyboard Editing mode - We added our audio level control functionality to our Storyboard Editing mode.

Ripple Edit - More complex editing requires a Ripple Editing function. We have now added this functionality.

Media management and project work:

The WeVideo Hub (HTML5) - We have now given our users a completely new place to collaborate, organize and share their projects and media. We have also created a public video page for easy sharing, complete with customizable embed code.

Support for new media formats -

LINK:	http://blog.wevideo.com/bid/332394/Educators-Communicators-and-Storyte...
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