Education 2.0 & 3.0

For many years I helped teachers and students use YouTube's annotations tool to create series of interactive or choose-your-own-adventure videos. Unfortunately, YouTube discontinued that service about eighteen months ago. This week a reader contacted me for a recommendation on other ways to make interactive videos. My suggestion was to try using Thinglink's video editor.

Some fairly obvious characteristics have made video the web's most engaging media type when compared to text, images and combinations thereof. It's the perfect blend of audio and visual elements, drilled down into bite-sized chunks that appeal to the modern viewers' desire for immediate understanding.

But that's not to say it's quite the perfect storytelling device. It's close, but falls down in one simple area: when it comes to interacting with video content, users have only really been able to play, pause, rewind and fast-forward.

Interactive video changes that. In a nutshell, this emerging technology combines video content with user input -- allowing viewers to take a wide range of actions while watching video content.

They can click areas of the screen to define their own journey, answer questions, complete forms, buy products, download content and more -- often without leaving the player window....

Real-Time Interactive Instructional Tool Set Offers Unique Functionality at an Affordable Price Ever wanted to just add PDF notes to your online classes and write all over them? 

As much as Generation Z has embraced technology for social engagement, they very much still value an on-campus education experience.

Does your faculty embrace video?

Members of Generation Z say they vastly prefer video as a learning method, according to Beyond Millennials: The Next Generation of Learners, a recent study from Pearson and The Harris Poll. The study notes that Generation Z, or students ages 14-23, have had their educational expectations shaped by technology in more ways than the 24- to 40-year-old millennials.

H5P is getting popular day by day because of the ease it provides in creating, sharing and reusing the interactive content. Before H5P it was a real pain to share and reuse the interactive content created on one platform due to the way the older file formats worked. H5P as a de-facto standard for interactive content has the potential to open the world up to the sharing and reuse of interactive content in a way never seen before.

H5P has changed the way how you can share the interactive content files among different platforms. Before H5P, if you want to share any such content, you need to send the file along with the instructions to reproduce similar content on the other system. H5P gives you the ability to share the interactive content as simple as sending a copy of the interactive video as you would an email attachment.

The H5P file format takes a completely different approach. Instead of describing the content through a standard, it itself is the content. And it comes with default code for both editing and displaying the content. That means that the content will always work, look and feel the same on all platforms and devices.

Want your college class to be exceptional? These strategies will make your teaching more engaging, effective, and satisfying for you and your students.

Video. Audio. Images. Text. Interactive questions. Great student-centered learning can happen at their intersection. Here are some ideas.