Interactive videos, like TedEd and Educanon, are new tools for my teaching tool box. Students in the 5th grade are very engaged by media such as videos, and finding ways to integrate them into teaching could prove very helpful. In the past I have limited the amount of video use in the classroom because I felt that videos did not hold the students accountable for the information that they learned. Tools such as TedEd and Educanon make it easier to hold students accountable.
At the fifth grade level I do not feel comfortable giving video lessons as "homework". I think the initial viewing needs to be part of the school day. I recently gave a parent survey on this topic and several parents said they would not want their child to have online homework, however they would want links to resources. I think that having the links to the videos used in the classroom available on a class website would be very beneficial for review and repetition before a benchmark exam.
I think Educanon and TedEd offer interesting differences in the way they are managed. I like how Educanon offers the ability to ask questions throughout the viewing. I think this helps keep students engaged throughout the video, however the questions at the end might offer a better summary of the learning. Also the use of open response questions allows the teacher to tailor and synthesize the information more closely to what they are learning in the classroom.
For instance the video that I selected. The "Brown" food chain gives information about food chains based off of dead and decaying matter, rather than the typical "green" food chain we usually learn about which has plants (producers) at the bottom of the chain. In order to more closely connect this to what we are learning in our classroom on ecosystems I was able to add in open response questions about what scavengers and decomposers we had in the ecosystems we built in our classroom.
The other tool on TedEd that is very helpful for our students, especially fifth graders, is the ability to get a hint. I love that if you get a question wrong you are encouraged to go back to the video. This is what we are constantly trying to teach our students in Reading Class. Students think that they have to "get" it on the first try and think they have failed if they have to go back and reread something. These hints that send them back to specific parts of the video reinforce that it is ok, in fact often necessary, to go back and re-read, re-watch, and re-learn some information.
Video learning is now a tool that I think could really enhance student learning in the fifth grade.
