Magisto is an amazing video editor that is an app on its own and is also available as a YouTube editing tool. It was on The Best Web 2.0 Applications For Education In 2011 list.

I’ve just started using it. As readers may know, I video tape a lot in my classes, and you can see tons on our class blog. The videos are short dialogues, singing, or presentations. Students really enjoy doing them. With my iPhone and connecting microphone (the in-phone recording doesn’t pick-up audio very well), I just videotape it, immediately upload to YouTube wirelessly, and we watch them as a class.

Afterwards, I go to the Magisto app on my phone, click the videos we just watched, and Magisto magically turns them into a well-produced musical production in minutes, which I then show to the classes. On one level, the videos don’t contribute much to English language development. On another level, though, students absolutely love them and are even more motivated to do well on the regular videos we take. They think I’m some sort of techno/wizard/magician, but I’m going to let them in on the secret tomorrow 🙂 . Then I’ll let students start taking turns making them.

It’s a pretty nice “bang for the buck” — it takes me about 1 minute to click what I want Magisto to do, then we do our regular class, and five minutes later I’ve got a very energizing video that students can watch for a couple of minutes. The only negative is that some of the available music doesn’t have class appropriate lyrics, but there are plenty of other options — including one’s own iTunes list.

Here are a couple of examples: