…well first other than our fearless leader, to post here!
One of the things we talked about today in our session was using YouTube videos in class and being able to download them to your computer before class. This way there is no lag time and the file remains yours, even if someone (or YouTube) pulls it down.
The website is http://www.keepvid.com
You cut and paste the url from YouTube into the box on the site, hit the download button and then it converts it. Once it is converted it offers you a few different ways to save it. The easiest is .mp4.
Hope this helps…and I am looking forward to hearing your tips and ideas as well!
-Chris @ Lyons Township High School
Writing and New Media 
Thanks a bunch for jumping in Chris and for sharing this resource!
Matthew,
I noticed on your class blogs that student contributors only had their first names and last initial. How can I make sure my students set up their accounts or posts to our class blog with only this info to protect their internet privacy?
Hey Scott!
Good question. Because I have a self-hosted WordPress blog, when I created the new users I was allowed/required to set their usernames. So I just used their first name and last initial (mainly because I had two Natalies and two Elizabeths and I figured I’d use the same naming convention all around).
If you were to use a wordpress.com blog, like this one, you might need to just require students to set their usernames using this convention. (It seems like you can’t preset a username on a wordpress.com blog.) Perhaps you could use a computer lab to do the registration in real time? Or, if students are signing up outside of class time, maybe you could require students use this convention and then just have any that don’t follow it reset their username or risk not being able to complete blogging assignments?
For what it’s worth, I do think a wordpress.org account, hosted on a server I pay for, it totally worth it. The one I use, BlueHost, always has “coupons” (google “BlueHost coupons”) and it makes hosting and URL registration pretty cheap. E.g., right now you can get a URL and hosting for a year for $3.95 a month. (I have no affiliation with BlueHost, to be clear! They are just one of the more popular hosts I found on this page.)
Let me know if you have any more questions!