Boclips for Teachers is a new platform that provides short educational videos, teacher-curated collections of videos, and award-winning video content from a variety of different providers. The team currently has content from over 120 different educational providers, and all videos are ad-free and visible within their platform to help avoid stumbling onto distracting or inappropriate content.
In short, it’s meant to be a resource to help teachers quickly and easily find and share excellent video content for the classroom.
In short, it’s meant to be a resource to help teachers quickly and easily find and share excellent video content for the classroom.
Before jumping into the review, here is a short video from the Boclips that introduces the site and explains a little about the motivation behind the product:
Currently, Boclips for Teachers is completely free for teachers for a full year, provided you sign up before June 30, 2019. Unfortunately, official pricing details are not currently available for after that.
In terms of content, the team is focused on providing videos that support with all US and UK K-12 subject areas. To this end, Boclips has partnered with 120+ content providers such as Crash Course, Visual Learning Systems, Intelecom Learning, and numerous others. These content partners help ensure that the videos available through Boclips are not only suitable for the classroom, but are high quality as well.
In order to find a video, simply use the search bar at the top of the home page. You can also search video collections that other teachers have created and made public. In the future, the Boclips team will also be adding additional search options like being able to browse by subject and age level.
Once you find the video, you can copy and share out the link with students through an email, your LMS, or any other way you might share out information. Students do not need an account to view videos in Boclips, and once they click on the link they will be automatically taken to the ad-free, distraction-free video. Here are the steps for sharing a video in action:
In addition to quickly and easily finding and sharing great classroom videos, Boclips allows teachers to create their own curated collections of videos.
After finding a video you’re interested in adding to a collection, you can click the Save button to create a new video collection or add it to an existing video collection. This is a great way to keep the videos you need organized by topic or by unit.
Unfortunately, there is no way to currently share an entire collection of videos with students (which would be a great strategy for differentiation - sending different groups of students different collections of videos), but this feature will be added in the future.
Overall, I think Boclips has good classroom potential. In addition to providing an easy way for teachers to organize online videos, the ability to send students to safe, ad-free, and distraction-free videos is huge. It’s already easy enough to get distracted in today’s digital world, and cutting out these additional distractions that students are almost always exposed to when online is definitely a benefit. Plus, even if you’re not sharing videos out to students, Boclips is still a solid resource to help teachers find high quality content from excellent, award-winning content partners.
That being said, there are unfortunately still a lot of features in development that aren't available for testing, and pricing details are unconfirmed. My recommendation - sign up for a free account while you can, and see if it's a good fit for your classroom!
