Producing and using your own videos in your classroom is as powerful as a cheat code. However it can take too much time to do this well, unless you use Clips for iOS.

Videos in My Classes

I love using videos in my classroom! Whether they are videos I made or videos made by others my students experience a ton of video while enrolled in my class. My reasoning for this is best conveyed by Salman Khan in his TED talk “Let’s Use Video to Reinvent Education.” Several years ago, I took the plunge and started making my own videos for my classes, and I have not looked back. However, making high-quality flipped videos is a time-consuming process. I have certainly had dry spells where I was too busy to make the types of videos I wanted to, so I put off making them until later. Often too late to help me that year. Needless to say, I am on the hunt for an easy way to make high-quality videos for my classes.

Clips

I remember seeing a mention of Clips in an Apple Keynote a few years ago and thinking it looked cool, but then never checking the app out when it was released. In fact, I forgot about it until recently. Here is my initial impression of Clips (made entirely in Clips)

I think I really like Clips! As I said in the video, Clips fits the gap in my video production that I wanted to fix. Clips should be a nice way for any teacher to make a polished video for their class on the fly and from anywhere.

Conclusions

While I like Clips there are two things I did not like:

The square aspect ratio is the only aspect ratio. This fits perfectly for some applications (Instagram or Flipgrid), but I wish there were an option to do 16:9.
This app killed my battery! It might be because I have an old iPhone 6s Plus, but this app ate through my battery pretty quickly. I had to plug my phone into an external battery pack to finish filming.