Video Apps for Instruction

Using online videos for instruction can be a good way to disseminate information, but students are often not actively engaged while watching the videos.

Both Zaption and Educanon offer a way to keep students engaged while they watch short videos.  You can add questions and slides and even crop the videos.  Once students have completed the activities, you can view the results.

Zaption seems to be easier to use, but Educanon can be used from within Edmodo.

Here are videos I created on each site.

Can You Be a Hero?

Okay, so it's only a hockey video, but if you read after it, I will connect it. Promise.


I think the narrator sort of sounds like Gandalf speaking to Frodo in The Lord of the Rings, but for me, that's pretty cool.

When I watched this video online, the first thought that struck me is that we educators can be heroes. When I was an English teacher, students often thanked me for "all I did for them." I had no idea what I did. They certainly weren't thanking me for making them read Shakespeare and Shelley and Coleridge. Well, some of them did.

To a kid, of any age, it's really so easy to be a hero. The idea relates to the "relationship" part of the AVID program. Just be there. Just care.

And care enough to step out of your comfort zone, to learn as much as you are hoping your students will learn, to try new technologies that reach them, that let them know you care about what's important to them.

I cringe when I hear someone demean the teaching profession, especially if the person doing the demeaning is an educator.

Ours is a priceless profession. Not many professionals have the opportunity to influence as many people as we do, and even more important, the people we're influencing are our future.

Not everyone can be a teacher, and even fewer can be a good teacher. It takes special qualities: wisdom, patience (tons of that), loyalty, compassion. We have those qualities for a reason.

We may not be Sidney Crosby or Evgeni Malkin (they're two of the stars of the team in the video), but we can be heroes. We can be heroes without even knowing it.

One thing I do know, our students need heroes, even if they don't think so. Will you be one?

Engaged Students

No, I'm not referring to high school marriages (although where I grew up in the sticks, that was common). I'm referring to students engaged in learning.

This morning, I was walking through the hall after fixing yet another Pinnacle problem, and I saw three students sitting outside a classroom using laptops to work on their Voice Thread projects. They weren't talking about unrelated gossip. They were discussing how they could make their project look good.

It was awesome to see the collaboration. They were very serious about their project. That's the part of my job that I love--using emerging technologies to engage students in learning, making it "real" for them.