Three Ways to Use Video in End-of-Year Review Activities

The end of the school year is rapidly approaching. If you're a high school teacher you probably planning for final exams and final exam review session. You might have in-classroom review sessions planned. But you probably have some students asking for review activities that can be done outside of classroom hours. That's when video is helpful. Here are three ways to use video in end-of-year review activities.

YouTube Live
In early April YouTube made it easier than ever to create a livestream from your laptop or phone. You can use this free service to host online review sessions for your students. Or they can do it themselves. Enable the live Q&A feature to allows your students to submit questions during your live broadcast.


Include Videos In Google Forms Feedback
When you create a quiz in Google Forms you can include links to YouTube videos in the answer feedback section. If you're publishing practice quizzes for students, put some videos in to help them understand why an answer was correct or incorrect. While we're on the topic, you can save yourself a lot of time when making quizzes by using these Google Forms settings.

Build Questions Into Videos
There are many tools that will let you build questions into the videos that you might share with students as reviews before final exams. EDpuzzle and PlayPosit are probably the two tools that are best known in that market. Both will let you add multiple choice, true/false, and short answer questions to the timeline of videos that you own as well as those that you find online on places like YouTube and Vimeo. I like that both have a setting to force students to watch the video before answering a question.

How to Place Videos Side-by-Side in a Google Sites Page

In a post earlier this morning I mentioned placing videos side-by-side in a Google Sites page. Within minutes I got an email from a reader who wanted to know how to do that. The way to do it is to simply insert two videos into a page then drag and drop them next to each other. You might have to re-size the videos first to make sure they will fit side-by-side. I made the following one minute video that shows you how to put two videos side-by-side in Google Sites.

The Life of a City - Early Silent Films of New York City

The Library of Congress has some neat playlists on YouTube that history teachers should explore. One of those playlists is titled The Life of a City: Early Films of New York. This playlist includes 24 silent film clips of events like the opening of the East River bridge, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Parade, and the first automobile parade in downtown Manhattan.


The films on their own don't tell you a whole lot about what you're seeing. However, the descriptions included below each video on YouTube are full of information about what you're seeing, when it was filmed, and who filmed it.

Applications for Education
One of the ways that students might use these videos is to include them in a side-by-side "then and now" display. They could create those displays in Google Sites or any other website builder that supports side-by-side video displays.

Some of the videos would be excellent to use in multimedia timelines about the development of New York City. And the automobile parade video featured above would be good to include in a timeline about the development of the automobile industry. Timeline JS is a great tool for making multimedia timelines. I have a tutorial on how to use it included in this Practical Ed Tech posting.

How to Create Staff Notebooks in OneNote

Early this year I was finally convinced that Microsoft's OneNote is a product that I should be using more often. In fact, I've moved all of my bookmarking and digital note-taking into OneNote and now use Google Keep just for reminders and shopping lists (yes, I know you can do that in OneNote too, but old habits die hard). Sharing and collaboration is one of the key features of OneNote. You can create OneNote notebooks to share with students and notebooks to share with colleagues. To that end, Microsoft has an excellent three-part course about creating staff notebooks in OneNote.

OneNote Staff Notebook: Tools for Staff Collaboration is a free course that walks you through how to create staff notebooks. The course is not just a series of tutorials, it includes suggestions for application with your staff as well suggestions for questions to use while facilitating your own training on OneNote staff notebooks. The entire course is estimated to take 30 minutes to complete.