Andrew Carlos is one of the STEM/Web Services Librarian at California State University, East Bay. He is currently working on a Masters in Instructional Science and Technology at California State University, Monterey Bay.

Welcome back to the second part of our two-parter series on interactive video in the classroom. When last we saw each other (oh those weeks ago), we talked about how you can make YouTube interactive through annotations – sort of like a choose your own adventure type of video.

In this week’s installment we are going to talk about tools that allow you to engage your students throughout a video, through quizzes and interactivity. We’re going to start out by having a quick overview of a few different tools, then we will focus on a specific tool that I have experience with and you’ll even get to see it in action!

The three tools I want to highlight are EdPuzzle, eduCanon and TEDEd. Both EdPuzzle and eduCanon allow you to take preexisting videos and overlay questions regarding the content for students to answer. The video will pause to allow students enough time to think and answer. Both work with a huge variety of video sources  – not just YouTube, but TeacherTube, Vimeo, KhanAcademy, etc. Don’t forget you can even upload your own videos to these sites and then create your quiz. Ultimately, these two tools create quizzes and brief instruction in an easy to consume format.

TEDEd takes this a bit further by really encouraging the development of FULL lessons. As you can see in the screenshot above, the student is presented with a video on the left and then a set of tasks on the right hand side. Each task is a different activity – Watch is watching the video, Think is answering quiz questions, Dig Deeper provides additional content and context and Discuss encourages collaboration and connection with peers.

Feel free to explore those three tools. All are powerful and feature great interactive features. They all also allow you to track student progress through your lessons for assessment purposes.

However, for me, I found EdPuzzle to be the easiest to work with. I made a short video about Boolean Operators using chocolate in EdPuzzle – you can see it in action below.

https://edpuzzle.com/media/54fa82ab7e9a58982bb39022

When creating a new EdPuzzle, you have four things that you have to do, aside from choosing a video to work with:

• Crop the video – if the video is too long, make sure to crop it so that students don’t get bored!
• Narrate the video – if they video doesn’t have narration or you want to overlay your own narration over the whole video, you can do that!
• Add audio note – you can add one time audio notes as clarification, commentary, etc.
• Add quizzes – you have the choice of three types of quizzes – multiple choice, free response or commentary.

I’m definitely having fun with all of these video tools and I hope you are too! Let me know if there are any other ones that you like, by tweeting me @infoglut.

Author: Brooke Ahrens

Brooke Carey Ahrens is a Google Certified Teacher and Instructional Technology Coordinator at a bay area high school. Brooke is currently serving as a rep Northern California Region rep for the California School Library Association.

Categories: Blog Topics, Technology