The Rise Of E-Learning
Remember those days when you had to attend a college class to learn a new skill? Or when you had to look something up in the library in order to research it in more detail? Fast forward to today and face-to-face education is quickly becoming outdated. From language apps to e-books, online teaching lessons, educational YouTube channels, and e-learning courses, it’s possible to learn anything you want using resources on the internet.
We can grumble and complain about today’s generation spending too much time on their electronic devices all we want, but there’s no denying that the world wide web is an incredible asset. Without it, what would we do with ourselves during lockdown? In its absence, how could we entertain and educate our kids now they’re out of school?
Safe Online Education
Certainly, there are disadvantages to the internet and the lack of security can be an issue. The sheer amount of junk that’s online almost definitely surpasses the educational content, which is why we need technology to limit the distractions and inappropriate material that our children experience while using the web.
In this article, two of the most popular safe video sharing websites will be compared – SafeShare and ViewPure. Various features will be reviewed and analyzed to provide you with a detailed understanding of how they function and their suitability for your educational needs. Although these two cloud-based tools are useful for just about anyone wishing to rid their videos of distractions, they particularly fit the needs of educational facilitators and parents who wish to share safe content with young children and students.
Introducing SafeShare
A solution to all of the pop-up advertisements and other annoying distractions, SafeShare allows you to de-clutter YouTube and Vimeo videos, making them secure for young people to view. The tool is cloud-based, so it’s easy to access from anywhere without the hassle of having to download or convert anything. After copying and pasting the YouTube or Vimeo URL or search term, teachers and parents have the ability to clip videos to their desired length before sharing it with their students or embedding it into a website.
Introducing ViewPure
Similarly, ViewPure is a tool that enables its users to “purify” YouTube videos to remove distracting comments and related videos from the side-bar. ViewPure is cloud-based and consequently, teachers and parents have the ability to save and view safely edited clips directly on the website. With an integrated YouTube search feature, keywords or URLs can be used to locate the required video. The start and end position of the clip can be adjusted before being embedded and/or shared.
User Interface
First impressions count and the way that you interact with a tool is the predominant consideration when choosing between two alternatives. This applies to both the back-end of the website (teacher/parent interface) and the end product (student-facing video clip). Here we will look in-depth at the user interface of both tools.
SafeShare User Interface
SafeShare’s user dashboard is remarkably thorough and provides easy access to all of its features. From here you are able to create new SafeViews and save them to playlists, which enables teachers and parents to organize them according to subjects or any other chosen categorization system.
SafeShare’s dashboard is comprehensive and easy to navigate
The dashboard is simple to navigate with a bright and cheery interface and a comprehensive side-bar menu. Despite the broad range of operations that are actionable from the dashboard, the platform is far from cluttered and presents a minimalist appearance. Users also have the option to edit their settings, change their account membership level, contact support, and visit SafeShare’s social media channels.
After clicking on a saved video, an extra menu appears at the bottom right corner of the screen, providing additional options to play, share, edit, delete, and add a new video. Besides being able to adjust the length of a saved clip, SafeShare gives you the option to add a title and description – a useful feature for teachers! Once there are SafeViews ready to be watched, users can effortlessly share these by copying and pasting the URL or QR code. Alternatively, teachers can distribute it to saved contacts or a circle (group) of contacts directly from the dashboard.
Users are able to edit the title, description, and start/end position of the video clip
Completed SafeViews are presented clearly in the center of the page with the chosen title and description displayed below. Basic controls are included, such as play/pause, volume, quality, fullscreen, loop, etc. Teachers can choose whether or not to keep the video private and can also see how many views it has had. If it’s not been made secret, then the SafeView has an accessible share button.
Teachers can view how many times a video has been watched
To improve further, the interface would benefit from search filters such as safety, date, relevance, etc. While the website works with both YouTube and Vimeo videos, it would be advantageous to integrate TikTok as well due to its growing popularity.
ViewPure User Interface
Sign-in to the ViewPure dashboard and you will be greeted with a handy demonstration video to help you navigate the site. It’s slightly less pleasing to the eye compared to SafeShare due to the large blocks of color, giving a somewhat clunky appearance. Nevertheless, the menu bar is clearly laid out and easy to navigate, although it lacks the option to contact support directly from the dashboard area and users have to navigate to the home page in order to do so.
ViewPure’s dashboard is clearly laid out and includes a useful demonstration video
ViewPure works slightly differently in that it opens up a new search tab when the user wants to add a video, which can be unnecessary and awkward at times. Moreover, while writing this comparative article, there were a few difficulties experienced with the site. These included the absence of results after inserting popular keywords into the search bar and, if a mistake were made while attempting to save the video, the search process would start all over again. Despite this, ViewPure does offer its users the option to add helpful search filters, such as SafeSearch, relevance, date, etc.
If mistakes were made while attempting to save a video, the search process would start all over again
Where ViewPure stands out is their provision of ready-made educational videos (Teacher Resources), which are divided into groups according to the students’ level. It also provides users with the option to create a unique and memorable URL for saved videos – an option that is only available to Premium users of SafeShare.
Users can create unique and memorable URLs for each video
Completed ViewPure videos are presented clearly in the center of the page with a few useful controls, such as play/pause, volume, quality, subtitles, fullscreen, etc. In contrast to SafeViews, it also offers playback speed controls and links to the original YouTube video. Depending on how easily distracted students are, this could be a disadvantage but could also be useful for other types of viewers. From this screen, users can easily share the video using the URL or QR code and they can also choose to embed it.
Pricing And Features: What’s Included?
As a tool widely used by teachers and parents, safe video sharing tools need to maintain equitable pricing while still providing valuable services. In the following section, the different plans that are offered will be compared.
SafeShare Pricing And Features
SafeShare offers a free trial of its Single Premium Plan for 7 days. After providing billing information, users will gain unrestricted access to all Premium features. No money will be charged to the account until after the free trial expires.
Upon expiration, the Single Premium Plan is priced at $4.99/month or $49.99/year. The plan can be canceled or changed at any time and users can subscribe for as little as one month. There are a further three plan options for Organizations, which operate a tiered discount system. This means that the more users you add to the plan, the lower the pricing per team member. This automatically adjusts as an organization adds or removes users, but stops reducing after 20 accounts.
SafeShare offers an extensive Free Plan
There is also a Free Plan available, which includes 20 SafeViews, 2 playlists, 10 contacts, and 2 circles.
ViewPure Pricing And Features
Unlike SafeView, ViewPure does not offer a free trial of its Pro Account and instead encourages its users to sign up to the Forever Free Account to test its services. The website doesn’t specify how many videos you can save until you have registered but once you have, it clearly displays the entitled amount on the left-side menu bar. Users can save 10 videos, 1 playlist, and 1 group of contacts.
ViewPure offers a Forever Free Account and currently has a sale for School and District Accounts
The Pro Account plan is priced at $4.95 per month or $49.50 per year, so approximately the same as SafeShare. For educational organizations, ViewPure offers a School and District Account that would normally cost $99.00 per month and per school (although they are currently offering a coronavirus sale at $62.50 per month and per school). The regular pricing works out at $4.95 per user, so there is no tiered discount system here. Nevertheless, once 20 teachers have been added, additional users can be added for no extra cost, as long as they teach in the same school building.
Conclusion
SafeShare or ViewPure – which one should you use? There’s no right or wrong answer to this one, as you will have to take into account your own wants and demands before making the decision. Nevertheless, this conclusion will endeavor to provide a balanced response.
The Winner: SafeShare
Firstly, when considering which website best solves the problem of internet distractions and inappropriate content, both SafeShare and ViewPure perform well. However, ViewPure still links back to YouTube by clicking on the video clips, which may qualify as a distraction. Also, the player offered by SafeShare seems to be far superior in terms of avoiding firewall issues that school teachers often deal with.
The user interface comparison demonstrated that SafeShare had more features available within the dashboard and seemed to be more easily navigable. Furthermore, the aesthetics were more pleasing and tasteful than ViewPure, although that is partially subjective.
Although ViewPure offered a few extra features, including search filters and a free database of safe video resources for educational facilitators, SafeShare gave more features overall and allows its users to securely share both YouTube and Vimeo videos.
Finally, pricing is very similar and both tools provide a range of competitive plans for individuals and groups. Depending on the needs of an organization, which one you choose based on cost depends on how many users you wish to add per school building. If you wish to use a free account, then SafeShare would be the best choice based upon the amount of SafeViews, playlists, and contacts you can have.
Overall, it is evident that SafeShare is the winner in this head-to-head comparison, although certain circumstances might lend themselves to ViewPure. For example, an organization might want to take advantage of ViewPure’s coronavirus sale.
