Skip to main content

ISTE Top 10 - #4 - Zaption (?)




This WAS my favorite thing at ISTE but I just found out the company sold and is closing on September 30th. WHAT?!?! 

It is a lot like EdPuzzle (a site where you can embed questions in YouTube videos) with the exception that there is a "presentation mode".

With EdPuzzle you can have students join your class and assign them YouTube videos, with questions to answer embedded in the video...this works well if YouTube isn't blocked and you don't have buffering issues.

What I liked about Zaption is the presentation mode (which EdPuzzle doesn't have). Basically a teacher can show the YouTube video (with questions) on their interactive white board (in a lot of schools YouTube is not blocked for teachers). Students would join the presentation with their device. As soon as a question pops up within the video it gets pushed out to students to answer (so they aren't watching the video on their device just answering questions).

The only reason why I am highlighting it is that I want EdPuzzle to adopt this feature (email already sent!) and I want to follow the purchase of Zaption to see if they are going to rebrand the product in the future.

Update...this is the response I got from Edpuzzle..kudos for the quick reply but UGH on the response: Thanks for your suggestion but the presentation mode doesn't match our product. We believe each student should learn at their own pace and that is one of the most important parts in EDpuzzle. We understand it can be engaging and useful (specially) if the district blocks YouTube. There are some really good apps that enable you to do something similar. I hope you understand our position. We will definitely keep working on some surprises for our teachers.

I am going to play with some of our programs to see if I can't do something similar...I'm thinking ClassFlow might work with their new desktop feature

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Secret Messages - How To (Light and Color)

This was fun activity that I got from Roper Mountain Science Institute. They suggested red theater gel to reveal the message, which can get pricy. Another idea I heard was to ask movie theaters to donate left over 3D glasses, which also have a red filter. A guest speaker we had last year said red jello would work. Tried it this week and it worked like a charm. The students thought it was very cool. I found my "attention challenged" students had trouble focusing on making their own secret messages so I was very glad that I had made extra copies of the sheets from the GEMS Color Analyzer book that they could color and then check under the jello.

Picture of the Day - Activity

I attended a training class and a science coach shared an activity that he does with his students to help them differentiate between observations, inferences, and predictions. He puts a picture on the interactive white board as a warm up (he gets the pictures from a variety of sources but uses National Geographic's Picture of the Day a lot). The picture above is from the National Geographic site. He has the students make five observations. Then he makes the students make five inferences. Finally he has the students make five predictions. He does this every day and it really drives home the difference between those three key inquiry vocabulary terms. I've done this activity with both my sixth and fourth grade science classes and the students really got into it and became proficient at telling me the difference between those terms.

QR Project - Open House

Twitter Post Link -  https://bit.ly/3Umic7r I saw this adorable QR code project on Twitter and decided to try it out with a couple of third grade classes. We have several schools in our district who are "Leader in Me" schools and I asked a teacher if I could come in and make them for her open house (you don't need to be a "Leader in Me" school but I know they do a lot of goal setting and mission statements). She loved the idea! I decided to use Flip (formally Flipgrid) to do the recording. The web based program is free for educators and automatically generates the needed QR code. We started on a Thursday. I pulled students into the hall to get a picture of them holding a square piece of paper prior to an ELA block. The paper acted as a place holder for the QR code (which is square) and ensured I got the correct hand spacing so the students looked like they were holding the QR code. I found a spot that didn't have anything in the background. The background...