Best Practices for Showing Videos in Class

What do you have in your hand when you are at home watching TV—what do you use to rewind, make the TV louder, or turn on closed captions? The remote control. When you go to the movie theater, why do you get to pick your own seat? So that everybody can see the screen.

Now let’s think about how we show videos in school. The students in the back of the room have to look past rows of students. If the volume is too high, the teacher next door will complain, but if the volume is too low, the students in the back can’t hear. When students are taking notes or answering questions, they miss part of the video because it continues to play while they’re focused on their writing.

If we don’t hear or understand something on the TV, we can pause, rewind, or turn on closed captions, but students are at the mercy of the pacing set by the teacher.

Empower Students With a Personalized Learning Experience

So, how can educators hand over the remote control to the students? Can we realistically give each student their own remote control? Videos play an important role in the classroom, but we can make them personalized, engaging, interactive, and accessible for all students. Personalized learning can be a daunting task to tackle, but empowering students to personalize how they watch videos in class is a good place to start and will increase their understanding and engagement. Fortunately, there are many edtech platforms that provide opportunities for personalization.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking: “I need to stop the video to explain or elaborate on parts of the video.” Utilizing edtech platforms allows teachers to customize and enhance videos by adding their own notes and audio to provide additional details and content.

There are many advantages for both students and teachers when utilizing edtech platforms for students to interact with educational videos (different edtech platforms offer different features and vary in accessibility tools):

• You can use closed captions, pause, rewind, control playback speed, control volume, disable fast-forwarding.
• You can safely share videos without fear of inappropriate ads in the beginning of the video and without suggested videos at the end. 
• Absent students still have access to the video and your instruction.
• You can assign differentiated videos to meet students’ varied needs.
• Neurodivergent students can put on headphones and block out outside distractions. 
• You can edit or trim videos to your preferred length.
• Students receive immediate feedback and answer explanations.
• Embedded AI can generate questions and answers and provide feedback.

So how can you press play and start personalized video engagement? You can get started with the support of edtech platforms such as Edpuzzle, Quizizz, Formative, Kami, Google Classroom, and Screencastify. They all provide some level of personalized accessibility options for students, features to support teachers in content creation, and insights on student performance. Even video-based platforms like BrainPOP now offer many levels of differentiation and accessibility features. Their new updates have grade-level banded questions, reading passages, quizzes, and vocabulary, all while empowering students to pause, rewind, use closed captions, control playback speed, and use their immersive reader.

EdTech-Based Personalized Learning Benefits Teachers

There are many other benefits for teachers when students are engaging with videos independently. Now you’re no longer tied to showing the video to the whole class; you can dedicate that time to support students in other ways. You can monitor student understanding and provide feedback in real time because now, the questions are self-grading. 

Through using edtech platforms, students are getting immediate feedback instead of waiting a day or two for you to return their graded work; class time is no longer spent going over all of the answers and can be dedicated to additional direct instruction. You’ll also receive data to direct and plan your next lesson. Need sub plans and worried that the substitute may not understand the content? Assign a video for meaningful instruction, accountability, and feedback.

You can record your own videos to flip your classrooms for differentiated instruction, blended learning, station work, and remote work, and to help navigate the revolving door of students in and out of your room for various reasons. Utilize videos available in your school’s library, and upload your own video. Some platforms even allow you to record yourself and your screen right on the website. 

Record your science experiments, how to solve multistep math equations, teacher read-alouds, and more. World language teachers, speech teachers, and English as a new language teachers can record themselves so that students can hear proper pronunciation, model language, and have opportunities to respond using audio. These types of videos are especially helpful for students—and parents—to refer back to for additional review and understanding or if they were absent.

Here are some other video options you can consider:

• Information for Meet the Teacher Night 
• Syllabus and class policies
• Virtual field trips 

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to get started. Using content that you already have, you can start small with just individual video viewing, then work your way up to adding questions and notes, then include answer feedback. When and if you’re comfortable, try creating your own content.

Handing over the remote control to students for self-paced, personalized, interactive, and engaging video viewing benefits both you and your learners. So grab your popcorn and press play on personalized learning!