Last week I shared some observations from evaluations of some relatively large school district websites. In that blog post I mentioned that better websites put the latest and relevant information on the homepage and do not rely solely on social media to spread the news about their school and their district. This is because when you rely on social media, you expect parents and students to notice your posts in a sea of all the other social media updates they see in a day.
If you choose to use social media to share updates about your school district or school, posting videos is a great way for people to increase their chances of seeing your message. But not everyone is comfortable with a camera or a good video editor. This is why you might be interested in using a tool that turns your writing into video for you. The following tools will do this.
Lumen5 is a service that will create a video for you based on your written work. To create a video with Lumen5 you can enter the URL of your published work or paste the text of your blog post. Lumen5 will then select features from your text to feature in a video Lumen5 previews a video for you based on the title, keywords, and key phrases of your blog post. The video will contain pictures and video clips that match the wording of your blog post. The completed Lumen5 project can be shared directly on Facebook. You can also download your videos on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and anywhere else where you want to post short videos. Watch this video to see how Lumen5 works.