Print out a YouTube video. Handy tool or shiny gadget?

Yup. Print out a YouTube video. Holy sweet Googly tech trick, Batman!

When you are watching any video on the YouTube website, the storyboard (the images that appear just above the play bar when slide your cursor along it) for that video is automatically downloaded in the background. The Print YouTube tool stitches all of those storyboard image frames into one large poster that you can then download as a PDF or print out.

To get started, you drag the Print YouTube bookmarklet to your bookmarks toolbar. Then open any video on YouTube, click the bookmarklet link, and the storyboard images are instantly generated. These storyboards offer a visual summary of videos and you can generate them for short videos as well as full-length movies.

But mmm . . . this seems like a perfect example of the question we should be asking every time we find out about a new tech tool:

Sure. We can do it but why would you want to?

Mmm . . . literacy skills. Writing prompts. History connections. Links to documents. Cause and effect analysis. Cut up and have kids re-arrange into correct order. Share rough drafts of student storyboards.

Need an example? I love the Where the Hell is Matt series. Here’s one of those videos in storyboard format:

Here’s the storyboard with scenes from the musical, Hamilton:

Or maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s just a shiny gadget that has no classroom use. Play with it and explore the possibilities. But I’d be curious to know what you might do with something like this.