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Authoring with Video
Authoring with Video Teacher Resources

The materials below can get you started exploring captionwriting with your students. We hope you will download MAGpie, and experiment with the sample digitized videos and lesson plans. Note: In order to avoid influencing students' caption writing, the audio tracks have been removed from the two WGBH videos offered below. Teachers will have to turn off the audio in videos from other sources. Please contact Trisha O'Connell if you have suggestions or caption-writing experiences that we can share with other teachers.

Technical Note: You will need the free QuickTime Player installed on your computer to play the videos provided below. MAGpie works easily with videos that are in MPEG, AVI or Quicktime (MOV) formats. It will not work with video downloaded from sites such as Google that use proprietary media players.

View sample video clip (no audio track) with captions created using MAGpie.

Download MAGpie software

Student-friendly MAGpie manuals:

MAGpie Student Manual (Windows)
MAGpie Student Manual (Macintosh)

Video clips for students to download and use with MAGpie (these movies require the free QuickTime Player):

"From Seed to Flower"
This 1 minute, 7 second clip from NOVA: "The Shape of Things" depicts plant growth in time-lapse format, allowing the viewer to observe in just a few seconds some of the most important life stages of a plant, from germination to the formation of a flower, and several phases in between.

View "From Seed to Flower"
Download "From Seed to Flower" (3.2MB)

"Desert Biome"
This 4 minute, 58 second clip from NOVA: "A Desert Place" details the behaviors and habitats of some of the Sonoran Desert's creatures, focusing on the adaptations they use to survive in one of the most extreme environments in the world.

View "Desert Biome"
Download "Desert Biome" (20MB)

Visit Teachers' Domain to view "From Seed to Flower" and "Desert Biome" with program narration, captions and curriculum resources. Teachers' Domain is a free online library of K-12 multimedia resources, derived from NOVA, American Experience and other public television productions and partners. Currently, with the exception of the clips above, video segments on Teachers' Domain are only available as streaming media and cannot be downloaded for use with MAGpie.

Other Web-based sources of downloadable video for use with MAGpie include the Moving Image Archive, the Open Video Project and the Library of Congress' American Memory Collection.

Below are direct links to selected videos from these sites that may be useful to teachers experimenting with Authoring With Video.

Movie newsreels from 1929 to 1967
Early films of New York, 1898-1906
How Water Won the West: 1986 documentary
Duck and Cover: 1951 Civil Defense film for children in which Bert the Turtle shows what to do in case of atomic attack.