Last month, I had the opportunity to learn and share at San Gabriel Valley CUE's local ed tech conference, Techo de Mayo. During the conference, I attended a fantastic session by Bill Selak where he shared an awesome resource that I want to pass on.

Ever found a YouTube video at home that would be perfect for instructional use in the classroom, only to remember that YouTube is blocked at your school? Wouldn't it be great if you could download a video from YouTube, put it in your Dropbox or on a flash drive, and then transfer it to your school computer to show to your students? Well, you can through a great, free resource at www.clipconverter.cc. This fantastic, easy-to-use website enables you to paste in the URL (Web address) of a YouTube video, and the site will convert the video and download it to your computer. How cool is that?

Here are some great features of the site:

• You can download a video in multiple formats. Unless you’re planning to do something fancy, you'll probably want to stick with the default setting of MP4.

• If you prefer, you can download just the audio track of the video. To do this, select MP3.

• This is my favorite...ClipConverter gives you the ability to crop, meaning you can download just a portion of the video. For example, if you only want to download and show 30 seconds of the video, you can designate which part of the video you want to download. This eliminates the need to fast forward to a particular part of the video.

If you're a visual learner, here’s a short tutorial video I put together showing you exactly how to use ClipConverter: https://vimeo.com/42620847

Again, thanks to Bill for sharing this cool tool during his session at Techo de Mayo. If you're not already following Bill's work (billselak.com and @billselak), I highly recommend you do so.

Happy clipping, everyone!