Five Tools For Engaging Students with Video

When assigning students to view videos as part of a flipped or blended classroom assignment, there are three questions to think about:

• Are the students paying attention?
• How do you get students to focus on the important pieces of the video?
• Did they get out of the video what you wanted them to?

While there are huge benefits to students watching videos to gain information, merely watching them is too passive an activity to ensure that learning is always taking place.  The question becomes how to make these learning opportunities become more active and engaging experience?  This post looks at five different web-based tools for making student video viewing more engaging by providing viewers with not only opportunities to answer questions about the content of the video, but to make video viewing a much more dynamic learning activity.

The slideshow below displays introductory videos and examples of EDpuzzle, hapyak, Educanon, blubbr, and Zaption.

eduCanon Making Video Lessons an Active Learning Experience

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post about blubbr which would allow one to take clips from various YouTube videos and create questions about them.  Well eduCanon takes that concept a step (or five) further.  eduCanon was created in order to make the task of watching (and hopefully learning from) videos more of an active and engaging experience.  Rather than passively letting the video play, students have to answer teacher-created questions in order to proceed with the video.  Students are also unable to fast forward beyond what they have already viewed.  

Teachers can create video lessons using a variety of educational video sources including YouTube, Khan Academy, TeacherTube, Vimeo, Shmoop, and even upload their own screencasts.  Teachers can create class rosters and then keep track of who has watched the assigned videos and how well they did with answering the questions.  This is a great tool to use whether you are teaching in a Flipped or Blended classroom.

Podcasting with GarageBand 10

When GarageBand was updated to GarageBand 10, some of the intuitiveness was lost in that there was no longer a Podcast button for creating that type of audio file. While you can still create audio pods casts, you can not longer create enhanced podcasts.  So, now that the students and teachers are using Mavericks, they are using GarageBand 10, and so will have to relearn navigating GarageBand in order to make audio files that can be uploaded to podcast sites like podbean, audioboom, or sound cloud. To that end, I have created a video tutorial and an a set of instructions that can be printed out that will help users transfer their skills and make the new GarageBand work for them.  Enjoy!

PixiClip: Great Web-based Whiteboard Tool

So, I was at ACTEM yesterday and attended Richard Byrne's session "Best of the Web Fall 2014."

Today, I go to the staff meeting at Mt. Ararat Middle School and one of the teachers sends me an email saying that he would like for his students to do some Khan Academy-style videos on how to do certain math problems. At his former school they had iPads and so used "Explain Everything" for this type of activity.  Was there something like "Explain Everything" that could be done on a MacBook?I then remembered that one of the tools Richard showed us was PixiClip.  PixiClip allows users to create and narrate drawings. It records not only the whiteboard you are drawing on, but can also capture your voice and possibly even video of you as you draw and narrate.  Users can also upload pictures to the whiteboard to label.  When you make a recording you can share it via social media like Facebook or Twitter, but you can also get the embed code to put into a web page, wiki, or blog. Click play on my example below. 

AudioBoom and GarageBand Test

listen to ‘Podcast Test’ on audioBoom