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Tools for Making Sure Students Watch Your Instructional Videos

ByRichard Byrne

Last week I wrote about using timestamps and transcripts to help students access specific parts of instructional videos. In reply a reader asked for suggestions on how to make sure students actually watch the instructional videos she makes.

I have three go-to suggestions for tools to use to make sure that students watch and pay attention to the instructional videos you create. One of them is using an overlooked feature in Flipgrid, another is a relatively new option in Screencastify, and the last is an old reliable.

Flipgrid Upload

Flipgrid is known as a platform for having students reply to prompts with short selfie-style videos. An often overlooked option in Flipgrid is to upload an instructional video that you’ve made and have students respond to it. How that works is demonstrated in this video.

Another option in Flipgrid is to record an instructional whiteboard video and ask your students to reply to it. That process is demonstrated right here.

Screencastify Interactive Questions

At the start of this school year Screencastify added a bunch of new features for teachers. One of those features is the ability to add interactive questions into your videos. You can require that students answer the questions in order to view each segment of your video. Watch this short video to learn how to add interactive questions into your Screencastify videos.

EDpuzzle

EDpuzzle has been around for years and I’ve used it for years to add questions into videos I’ve created as well as videos that I’ve found online to share with my students. Like Screencastify’s interactive questions, you can require that students answer your EDpuzzle questions in order to view each segment of your video. EDpuzzle also integrates nicely with Google Classroom and other learning management systems. My complete video overview of how to use EDpuzzle can be watched right here.

50 Tech Tuesday Tips!

In case you haven’t seen it, I have an ebook that I created with busy tech coaches and media specialists in mind. It’s titled 50 Tech Tuesday Tips, but the tips work just as well on other days 🙂