Edthena Makes it Easy to Blur Teaching Videos with New Feature

In a physical classroom, it’s easy to move the camera to hide details. It’s quite a bit harder when teaching is Zoom-style or hybrid.

The rise of teaching in virtual spaces has increased the need for teachers to be able to hide parts of their classroom videos, such as students’ names, for privacy reasons. Now, Edthena is making it easy for teachers to blur teaching videos before sharing with peers and coaches for instructional feedback on the award-winning platform.

“While sharing videos inside Edthena is always safe and secure, there are times when masking student information is important – maybe a teacher wants to share a video of teaching as an example across the district and the student name should be redacted,” said Adam Geller, founder and CEO of Edthena. “Our new platform functionality helps teachers quickly and easily blur whatever areas of their videos they need, with no extra programs or extension needed, so they can focus their time on self-reflection and collaborative PD.”

The new blur video feature inside of Edthena is drag-and-drop easy. Teachers simply drag and resize rectangles onto their video to create a permanently blurred area that will appear in a new version of the video. They can also trim the video length, if desired. When they hit the “Save” button at the bottom of the screen, the Edthena VideoBot takes care of all the technical details and delivers a blurred video into their private library automatically.

Teachers can then share these videos with peers and coaches to receive timestamped feedback categorized as questions, suggestions, strengths, and notes within the Edthena platform.

Edthena enables teachers and coaches to participate in collaborative professional learning. Reports and graphs, linked to the school’s or district’s associated professional standards, help identify teaching trends, determine if the professional development is improving teaching practices, and provide a basis for ongoing dialogue about instructional best practices.

Schools, districts, and teacher education programs in more than 30 states are using the Edthena platform to make video observation an integral part of teacher induction, teacher mentoring, professional learning communities (PLCs), and peer observation.

The new blur feature is available to all registered Edthena users. To learn more, visit Edthena’s blog.