It solves so many problems. And it is sooooo easy.

I just discovered Kapwing. The free web-based video editing suite offers nine features (and promises more to come) and I am so excited about sharing it with my students and using it in my teaching.  It’s a kind of media Swiss army knife perfect for schools.

Kapwing features currently include:

• Meme maker: for creating text captions to create memes from online images, GIFs, and videos
• Add Subtitles: to caption your videos with text overlays

• Video collages: frame images, GIFs, and videos either side by side or top and bottom

• Subtitle maker: Type and time out any text to overlay on top of a video
• Video Filters: get the perfect look by adjust the color and lighting of your uploading or online video
• Video Resizer: for cropping or resizing your videos’ aspect ratios to fit Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook in just three clicks.

• Loop Video: to repeating a video by looping it
• Video Trimmer: for trimming and cutting video to the perfect length

Stop motion: for transforming existing footage into a stop motion video

• Sound Effects Maker: for adding trendy sounds to your videos from a library of effects

Kapwing is ad-free. It requires no registration, no account creation and no sign-in. It works on iPads, Chromebooks, Macs, Windows, and other devices.

Kapwing plays nice with media content from YouTube, Google Drive, Vimeo, GIPHY and other content with URLs and there is virtually no learning curve.

The About page explains that Kapwing is the product of  Eric Lu and Julia Enthoven, 24-year-old web developers from San Francisco. They describe Kapwing as a website for casual creators . . . an online toolbox for short-form video and a place to browse funny and cool clips and they described their motivation for creating the site:

We noticed more and more video on our Facebook feeds, IG Explore pages, and Pinterest homes. When we looked into it, we learned that short-form video is eating the world. We wanted to help content creators, digital marketers, and video creatives make fun stuff in less time

Your work gets published with a little non-intrusive Kapwing.com watermark, but that is no big issue and it’s not a bad thing to share the credit.  If you wanted to, it would cost $2 to remove the watermark from an individual creation or you might subscribe for $10 a month or $100 a year.

I can see thousands of ways to use this as a utility for creating instructional and promotional materials and for so many student projects.

Though most kiddos won’t need it, here’s a little how-to article to help you get started.