Great Video-based Review Activities for End of School Year

May 31, 2014
This is the second post in a series of posts designed to help teachers wrap up the school year with engaging tech infused activities. The purpose is to keep students involved in learning until the last bell has rung. What I have for you today is a set of great web tools that you can use with students to create quizzes around videos. Most of these tools support the popular video hosting sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. And though there are minor differences between each tool, the overall process of creating a video quiz is almost similar.

Related: The Best Tools and Activities To Wrap Up The School Year

Using these web tools, you will be able to create  video-based review activities around topics covered during the school year. The great thing about these tools is that almost all of them allow for instant feedback, which means that students will be able to see how they performed on the quiz right away.

1- Vialogues

Vialogue (Video + Dialogue ) is an online video with a group discussion feature. Vialogue allows users to interact with videos by adding time stamped comments to them. This can be a great tool for teachers to use with their students to get them engaged in video prompted discussions.To get started, upload a video, grab one from YouTube, or choose one from the growing collection on this site. Once you’ve created a vialogue, you can encourage thoughtful conversations by posing questions, adding polls, and replying to comments. You can even embed a vialogue into your website, LMS, or blog!

2-Videonot.es

VideoNotes is a free web tool that allows students to take notes on a video they are watching. The notes are synchronized with the video being watched. The good thing about VideoNotes is that it is integrated into Google Drive which means that students will be able to save their notes directly to their Drive account and access, edit, and work on them anytime they want. All the notes are time-stamped.

3- Edpuzzle

Edpuzzle allows you to use only what you need from any video, insert audio notes or record over a video with your voice, and add questions at any point in the video and track your students' understanding.


4-Google Forms

Google Forms has made it possible for users to insert YouTube videos into their forms. You can now embed YouTube videos into forms and ask students questions to ensure they watch the video. Check out this guide to learn how more about how to insert videos into Google Forms.

5-TedEd 

TED Ed is a website that allows teachers to create lessons around YouTube videos. Teachers can select YouTube videos and use their URLs to add questions in different formats. The added value of this tool is that it has a section where teachers can track stats of how many have answered answers and how many students have seen the lesson. Check out this visual guide to learn more about how to created a video lessons using TED Ed.

6- Educanon

Educanon is another powerful tool that teachers can use to design lessons based on videos from both YouTube and Vimeo. And like Teachem, teachers can generate questions on the content of videos and share it together with videos in a single lesson.

8- Blubbr

Blubbr is a cool web tool that allows users to create quizzes around YouTube videos. These are basically interactive video quizzes ( called Trivs ) that you can create for your students and which they can answer while they watch the selected video clip. The quizzes are also feedback supported meaning students will get feedback as they answer each question.

 Follow us on : Twitter, Facebook , Google plus, Pinterest .

The Best Web Tools and Activities for End of School Year

May 20, 2014
There are a wide variety of activities you can use with your students to wrap up the school year. In today's post I am sharing with you 4 ideas you can apply in your classroom. I have also included web tools and apps to help you carry them out. The strength of these activities lies in the fact  that they enable students to exercise a combination of skills they have developed throughout the year. Students will have the opportunity to employ their writing skills in tandem with other digital skills to create artefacts, digital portfolios, memory books, and scrapbooks to document their learning and share their best learning experiences with others.

1- Make a poster about your school year

One of the great ways to wrap up your school year  is through getting students to create posters to highlight the major memories and happenings during the whole year. They can include pictures, hyperlinks, and images. Some of the tools you can use for this purpose are:

• Thinglink
• PiktoChart
• Glogster

2-  Creating Scrapbooks
Scrapbooking is another good way to  end the school year. Share with your students the tools below and have them use their laptops or iPad to create scrapbooks. Using their writing skills , students can combine a wide variety of multimedia materials such as text. clip art,  and images to create a story of their memories. When the scrapbooks are ready, students share them with their classmates and peer-comment on each others' work.

• Biteslide
• Photocollage

3- Creating  Digital portfolios
Creating digital portfolios is a good way for students to document and showcase their best achievement during the entire school year. Some of the best web tools they can use include:

• Google Sites
• Evernote
• Weebly
• Portfolio Gen

4- Creating Memory books
Instead of the pen and paper version of memory books we used to create when we were students, technology now affords a wide variety of possibilities to create awesome memory books stored in the cloud and accessible anywhere anytime. Some of the best tools I recommend for this is :

• Widbook
• Flipsnack
• Pageflip
• Mixbook

5- Creating Autobiographies

There are different ways for students to create autobiographies. They can do it through a write-up using tools such as Google Docs but the way I have been using it with my students in the past is through inviting them to create video clips ( sometimes with text integrated) to tell others who they are, what they have learned, places they have visited...etc. Some of the tools I would recommend for this purpose include:

• YouTube Capture
• Animoto
• Wevideo

 Follow us on : Twitter, Facebook , Google plus, Pinterest .

End of School Year Tools for Creative Summative Assessment

May 16, 2014
Looking to flex your creative muscle and build something? Here are a set of useful digital tools to help you put together all kinds of things, from websites to presentations to newsletters and more. Make something to enhance your lesson, or have your students construct something as a creative summative assessment activity.

QuizOperator 

Project this free quiz creator onto a whiteboard to show the real-time scores of your students. Or, use it for private quizzes.

Apollo 

Enhance your slide decks with audio and animated drawings. Then host live questions and manage the back channel of your presentations. 

The Tweeted Times 

Create a personalized newsletter based on the links tweeted by the people you are following. Articles are ranked by popularity.

PhotoFunia 

 Put your photos through this wide collection of filters to produce stunning, and even funny images. Available as a free web or mobile app.

MyBrainShark 

 Record your voice to augment your slide deck as a video you can embed on a blog. Or use this site to put together a simple podcast.

Posterini 

Assemble an online poster with easy drag & drop controls, then share it with friends, colleagues, or students.

Want more? Check out these collections of tools .
Maker/Coding Apps 

A collection of "maker" apps to help students construct their learning, 21st-century style. Curated by technology coach Elizabeth Espinoza.

Creativity and the Common Core 

 A collection of useful apps for encouraging and developing creativity. Curated by educator Linda Nitsche

Follow us on : Twitter, Facebook , Google plus, Pinterest .