My name is Amber Woodward and I have taught at Navarro for 11 years in the Math and P.E. departments.
The continual puzzle of teaching and technology is the part of the practice that never gets old for me. I love figuring out new tools and how they might improve my practice. That said, I am a big believer that technology should never be rolled out for its own sake. If it’s not improving what’s already in place in my classroom, the cost to bring on a new system isn’t worth it to me. Teaching through the pandemic was challenging soooo many ways, but having to rewrite all the ways we teach simultaneously was pretty high on the list. Now that we’re a few years past that difficult time, there are a few tools that I am happy to have added to my toolbox and still use regularly.
At the top of that list is PlayPosit. It is an excellent tool and one that I feel all teachers can easily and successfully add to their bag of tricks. In a nutshell, it is a tool that allows you to lay “interactions” on top of a video that makes it interactive and engaging for students in myriad ways. You can use existing videos that you find from YouTube or other existing resources or record your own as the base.
Then, on top of that you can create interactions for students at any multiple points. The video will stop wherever you want and ask students to provide the response in the form of a multiple choice answer, a free response, a poll, fill-in-the blank, or more. And then depending on their answer, you can ask the video to jump back to repeat the content, jump ahead to differentiate to a new topic (or skip over explanations), or pop-up a gif to cheer them on. The options are really limitless, I am only highlighting a few. Think of how many times you pause your direct instruction to ask one or two students to answer a question. PlayPosit allows you to stop your direct instruction and require *all* students to pause and engage with the question before the lesson continues and that is immensely powerful.
During the pandemic I used the tool as a way to get my direct instruction content instruction to students. In the years after I used it as a tool to get the content to students who were are absent. This year, I prefer live teaching so it’s not something I use every week, but periodically I want to take a day and have students work independently so I can conference individually with students. PlayPosit makes video instructions more engaging and sticky for student learning. than a simple video.
Take a look at the PlayPosit features and options below. Where do you see possibilities for further leveraging technology within your practice? Where might PlayPosit align with the needs and goals you have for students in your classroom? If it’s been a while since you’ve taken a look at this tool, I encourage you to reexamine the value it might add to your current practice.
Resource: Playposit Video Features
Resource: How to Access & Embed Playposit into BLEND/Canvas
Resource: AISD Playposit Course
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