2016 Spring Issue_The Leader_Zaption

8/16/2019 2016 Spring Issue_The Leader_Zaption

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Volume 30, Number 1 19

Scott M. Petri, Ed. D.: High School

World History teacher, Canvas

MOOC Instructor., So Cal Social

Science Association, President-

Elect, proud CCSS & NCSS

member.

Follow Scott’s blog:

http://historyrewriter.com/.

Many Social Studies teachershave embraced the ippedclassroom model. Research in-

dicates that the “ipped” learn-

ing model where students view

video lectures for homework and

practice skills during instruc-

tional time has a positive effect on

student achievement. According to

Ed Tech Magazine, teachers who

ip their classrooms are increas-

ing by 30% per year. The trendis most prevalent in middle and

high school. Most administrators

support these efforts and teachers

report that student engagement is

up as a result of ipping.

Princeton researcher, Laura Du

concluded that schools that used

ipped or blended learning lessons

performed as well or better on Cali-

fornia statewide standardized tests

than non-blended schools. Flipped/

blended learning was associated

with gains of up to 0.84 standard

deviations in math achievement and

up to 0.42 standard deviations in

English-Language Arts. These gains

represented the difference between

“Basic” and “Procient.” My previ-

ous work measuring the effects of

ipped instruction/blended learning

activities among a mixed group of

9th and 10th grade students (N=127)

revealed that online assignments fea-

turing exible deadlines and student

choice lowered class failure rates by

50 percent.

This article will describe some

of the procedures I have used when

ipping or blending my classroom

instruction and the results I have

received from assigning 40 Zaption

Tours to my World History students.

Assigning ipped videos helps me

frontload schema and academic

vocabulary, increases the amount of

checking for understanding I can do

with both individual students and

whole class instruction, teaches my

students to ask questions, allows me

to tap into students’ preferred learn-

ing modalities, and helps me extend

my classroom instruction online.

While I have exclusively used Zap-tion in this endeavor, there are other

tools such as EdPuzzle and edu-

Canon that also make instructional

video more interactive. I encourage

you to experiment with whichever

tools you nd most user-friendly and

report your results to The NSSSA

Leader.

Front Load Schema and Academic

Vocabulary

Zaption improves video based learn-

ing with interactive content and tools

that engage learners, deepen under-

standing, and track student progress.

Teachers can quickly add images,text, quizzes, and discussions to

existing videos from YouTube and

Vimeo and get immediate feedback

on how students interact with the

content and understand key con-

cepts. Zaption changes video based

learning from a passive experience

to an active learning event that front

loads schema and academic vocabu-

lary prior to conducting close read-

ing or classroom discussions.

In my class, I assign Zaption Tours

as homework. I call them note-tak-

ing drills and I use them to preview

the material that students will read in

their textbook. These lectures are no

more than 15 minutes in length and

have 3-5 checking for understanding

questions embedded in each video.

Students view a video, answer the

questions, then read the correspond-

ing chapter section and take a quiz.

During their study of the French

Revolution, my students were as-

signed ve video lectures which

were embedded with 30 questions.

Analytics reveal these were viewed

a total of 540 times with 66% of the

questions answered correctly.

Increase Checking for Under-

standing

Open-ended questions in the Zap-tion tours are not graded, but they

provide insight into student under-

standing. In an answer to one of my

open-ended questions: “Why do

you think King Louis XVI tried to

escape to Austria?” a student wrote:

“so Marie Antoinette’s brother the

emperor of Austria would help

them and see if the European rulers

would invade France.” This an-

Five Reasons to AddInstructional Video to

Your Social ScienceInstructional Program


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The Leader20

swer reected that only one out of

85 students connected information

from Marie Antoinette: The Journey

to the video lecture. I don’t know

what stung worse, the fact that most

students gave a simplistic answer

after spending 30 days reading the

Antonia Fraser biography, or the fact

that most students answered “To not

get punished by the people,” which

indicates they did not connect any

of the early passages of the book

detailing Marie Antoinette’s child-

hood as the daughter of the emperor

of Austria to our textbook readings

or video lectures.

When the gem below appeared on

my discussion board, it was too late

for me to help this student. They had

not listened to any of my lectures

and they had misunderstood what

they read in the book. Their funda-

mental lack of WWII knowledge

was at once horrifying and hilarious.

I have learned (the hard way) that

waiting for the end of unit writing

assignment to assess what students

have learned is setting yourself up

for failure. After students have taken

the test and written the essay, they

have no motivation to go back and

review the material no matter how

wrong they were. This year, Zaption

has become my go-to tool as I check

for individual student and whole

class understanding. I now embed

questions in my video lectures

and make my writing assignments

shorter and more frequent, so that I

can immediately assess student un-

derstanding and correct any misun-derstandings immediately.

Inspire Students to Ask Questions

Researchers understand that student

questions can improve instruction

and increase achievement, however,

students rarely ask their own ques-

tions in school (Marzano, Pickering,

& Pollack, 2001). When they do,

they ask more memory questions

involving knowledge recall than

all other question types combined

(Rothstein & Santana, 2011). Asking

broad, research-type questions can

be difcult for students because they

don’t always have a large enough

knowledge base on a subject to see

relationships and big picture issues.

My classroom experiences have

shown that if I use small groups to

get students to generate their own

questions about a topic, many groups

rely on one or two participants and

the other students are content to be

passive observers. Similarly, when I

try to have whole-class, student-led

discussions only 38% to 60% of my

students participate. Zaption Toursare helpful for giving students a

“safe place” to develop their own

questions. Only the teacher sees

them. I use them to encourage

discussion in class, broaden inde-

pendent research projects, and tap

into student motivation. Zaption

presents this data in tables or discus-

sion board threads for easy teacher

analysis. Discussion data also be

download into Excel spreadsheets

for further analysis.

Open-ended questions in my

WWII video lectures suggested that

my students had extensive back-

ground knowledge about the Holo-

caust. Prior to beginning the unit, I

asked students two open-ended ques-

tions: What do you already know

about the Holocaust? What do you

want to know about the Holocaust?

● What I’d like to know aboutthe Holocaust was? Who

came up with idea? What kind

of movies there are to watch

about the Holocaust?

● I want to learn if any groups

or people tried to rebel over

this power and try to support

and help Jews.

● I would like to know why

Jews didn’t fght back or resist

because it seem as if the Ger-

mans just killed the Jews with

ease.

● What I want to know is who

put a stop to all Hitler’s terror

and how did people just lethim do that?

● What I would like to know is

where did Hitler get all his

ideas about a master race?

● I would like to learn about

conspiracy theories and the

psychology of why Hitler

wanted to kill these people.

Was it a mental illness, or was

he simply racist?

● I know about the beginning,

middle, and D-Day. I want to

know about the ending of the

war.

● I would want to know about

how the German people

reacted to the concentration

camps.

This Zaption Tour was viewed 287

times and 107 students replied to allthe questions. These answers indicat-

ed that my students had a high level

of knowledge about the Holocaust

and were ready to engage in self-

directed inquiry. This information in

their answers helped me guide them

toward individual projects they were

intrinsically motivated to complete.

Tap Into Preferred Learning

Modalities

After three years of the ipped

classroom approach, I developed

two hypotheses: 1) Students with

higher reading scores prefer read-

ing the book to viewing the video

lectures; and 2) Students with lower

reading scores prefer viewing the

video lectures to reading the book.

In order to test these hypotheses,

I asked two samples of students


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Volume 30, Number 1 21

to describe which learning format

they preferred. The results soundly

debunked my assumptions. While

both groups of students preferred the

video lectures to the textbook, 36%

of students with lower reading levels

preferred taking notes from the book

rather than viewing video lectures.

Students who favored the video

lecture to the book made comments

like:

● I think I am learning more

from the videos because they

give off more information, they

clarify what the topic is about,

and I can rewind the video in

case I didn’t get that last piece

of information.

● Personally, the video lectures

help a lot more than taking

notes on the book. I can spend

more time on the video, the

book is more at. In the video,

main points are emphasized.

It’s slightly harder to pick

out key points from the book.

My brain works better when

it comes to listening because

when it comes to reading, my

eyes tend to skim and I can

miss key information.

● I like the video lecture bet-

ter because it tells us what to

write. You can take your time

and you can rewind the video.

In the book, it takes a long

time looking for what infor-

mation you are going to write

in your notes. When I openthe book it’s just like no and

it’s not interesting. The book

doesn’t capture my attention.

Students who preferred the book to

the video lectures made comments

like:

●

I think the book helps me bet-ter because you can go back

and easily fnd something you

missed, you can easily ip

through pages to fnd some-

thing, and it is less distracting.

● Taking notes from the book

helps you go at your own

pace. You can read as fast or

as slow as you want. The book

is easier to go back to a sen-

tence or paragraph than thevideo. The book makes it more

simple because you can study

and annotate in a way that you

will understand.

● I work better with books, they

have less complications. I am

a hands-on learner, books get

to the point. Video-lectures

can have complications. WiFi

can go down, you run out of

data, problems can happen. Books are always there to be

picked up and read.

These results seem to validate my

Zaption approach. When students

view video lectures which preview

vocabulary terms, names and events

rst, they are building background

knowledge. Then, when students

encounter these terms, names, and

events in their reading, they have

familiarity with them and it is easierfor the new knowledge to “stick.”

Regardless of which learning

method students prefer when these

two methods are paired, the video

acts as an anticipation guide prim-

ing the pump in a student’s memory

and reinforcing the stickiness of the

information in the reading. I have

found that students who view my

Zaption Tours, then read the text-

book and immediately take an online

reading quiz get an average of 84%

of the questions right on my end of

unit exam, whereas students who

do not engage in these instructional

activities get an average of 16% of

the same questions correct.

Extend Instruction Time Beyond

The Classroom

Our students are spending more time

online and blended or digital learn-

ing is becoming a necessary arrow

in an effective teacher’s quiver.

Zaption allows teachers to lever -

age the power of instructional video

in the face to face classroom. This

blending of online and face-to-face

instruction is expected to be standard

practice in in the future (Murphy,

Snow, Mislevy, et al., 2014).

When I have compared the class-

work and homework completion

rates of my online assignments to

the completion rates of my tradi-

tional assignments, I have found that

77% of my students completed their

online classwork and 71% complete

their online homework versus a

70% completion rate for traditional

classwork assignments and a 63%

completion rate for traditional home-work assignments. This aligns with

data from a recent Zaption analysis

of 400,000 viewers that showed

that while YouTube viewers only

watch 50% or less of a video before

clicking away, learners watch 78%

of every Zaption video lesson and

answer 90% of the questions embed-

ded within them (Bruner & Walsh,

2016).


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The Leader22

Recommendations for Classroom

Practitioners

Because the ipped approach

has been implemented unevenly

throughout schools and districts,

many Social Science supervisors

are unsure how to support teachersusing the model. Zaption provides

supplementary learning experiences

to accompany regular instruction.

Detailed analytics help teachers

monitor students’ engagement and

responses then implement deeper

learning experiences as follow-up

instruction. Deeper learning expe-

riences require engaging students

in active knowledge construction,

helping them make connections totheir prior knowledge, and apply

that knowledge in new settings. Start

slow when introducing instructional

videos to your classes. Emphasize

the active learning aspects. Many

parents are concerned about screen

time. Show them how Zaption Tours

turn passive viewing experiences

into active learning sessions. En-

courage your teachers to survey their

students’ perceptions about learn-

ing from video and document theirresults. I am condent you will nd

them signicant and positive.

Scott M. Petri is a World History

teacher in the Los Angeles Unifed

School District and President-Elect

of the Southern California Social

Science Association.

Excerpts of this article were

previously published at

www.HistoryRewriter.com. Dr. Petri

can be contacted via email at scott-

[email protected] or reached on

Twitter @scottmpetri.

References

Smith, D. F. (2014). How ipped

classrooms are growing and

changing. Ed Tech Magazine.

Retrieved online from http://

www.edtechmagazine.com/

k12/article/2014/06/how-

ipped-classrooms-are-grow-

ing-and-changing

Du, L. (2014). The Potential of K12

Blended Learning: Prelimi-

nary Evidence from California

Schools. Princeton University.Retrieved from https://issuu.

com/lauradu/docs/du-californi-

ablendedlearningpreview

Marzano, R. J., Pickering, D., &

Pollock, J. E. (2001). Class-

room instruction that works:

Research-based strategies for

increasing student achieve-

ment . ASCD.

Murphy, R., Snow, E., Mislevy, J., Gal-

lagher, L., Krumm, A., & Wei,

X. (2014). Blended learning

report. Michael & Susan Dell

Foundation.

Petri, S.M. (2014). Blended Learning

Experiment Cuts Fail Rate

50%. Retrieved from http://

petridishing.net/2014/05/26/

blended-learning-experiment-

cuts-fail-rate-50/

Rothstein, D. & Santana, L. (2011).

Make Just One Change: Teach-

ing Students to Ask The RightQuestions. Harvard Education

Press. Cambridge, MA.

Rothstein, D. & Santana, L. (2014). The

Right Questions. Educational

Leadership. 72(02) October

2014. Retrieved from http://

www.ascd.org/publications/

educational-leadership/oct14/

vol72/num02/The-Right-Ques-

tions.aspx

Stigler, J. W., Geller, E. H., & Givvin,K. B. (2015). Zaption: A Plat-

form to Support Teaching, and

Learning about Teaching, with

Video. Journal of e-Learning

and Knowledge Society, 11(2).

Bruner, R. & Walsh, C. (2016). Does

78% Make The Grade?

Retrieved from http://blog.zap-

tion.com/ost/138753103134/

zaption-increases-engagement

www.tcmpub.com(800) 858-7339

Authentic nonfiction and fictiontexts in multiple genres andmodalities provide a staircaseof complexity to: ◗ Build content knowledge ◗ Analyze craft and stucture ◗ Integrate kowledge and ideas

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2016 Spring Issue_The Leader_Zaption