HOTSpot - Chris - Using YouTube Live and Google Slides for interactive online review

Reviewing for final exams is always a hot topic this time of year. For many years, I have run after school review sessions that were often sparsely attended and inconvenient for my schedule to stay after school. Last year second semester, I ran my first online review session and it was a hit with the students and was much easier for me to schedule. This year, I decided to tie in the Q&A feature of Google Slides to allow my students to ask questions. What is great about YouTube Live is that the whole session will be recorded and posted on my YouTube Channel. Hopefully, the technology doesn’t get in the way of learning and makes this a simple online review session.

HOTSpot - Chris - My Simple Show

I was really dreading teaching about the properties of water because it can really be a dry topic (pun intended).  Wanting to change it up and make my students do more of the work to learn the material rather than me just giving it to them via lecture, I thought of having them make their own video cast. A few days before that lesson was coming up I found this awesome web tool called mysimpleshow.com on the Free Technology for Teachers Blog by Richard Byrne. What intrigued me the most about it was how simple it was going to be for my students to use, which meant most of the time was going to be devoted to learning the material and presenting it in a meaningful way. Looking back on this lesson, little time was wasted teaching them how to use the website, and the final products turned out really well. Definitely another tool to keep in my toolbox. Click here to check out some of their end products.

HOTSpot - Chris - Taking Notes on EDpuzzle

Using video can be a powerful piece of anyone's curriculum. Whether it's a video of you or something you grab from YouTube, giving students the ability to watch, rewatch, and pause can make a big impact on students who learn at a different pace than their peers. The problem I found with assigning videos, as I would a textbook reading for content, was that I didn't give my students a way to purposely take notes to record their understanding. EDpuzzle was great at adding questions for formative feedback from the kids about their understanding at the time they were taking in the content, but there was no takeaway for them. With the help of our Literacy Coaches, I realized that this piece of technology offered a whole lot more than what I was using. Using the comment feature of EDpuzzle allowed me to purposely pause my students at key points in the video to take notes, reflect, and record their understanding so that they now had something they could take away.