If you caught our podcast last week, you already know a little about Zaption. If not, it's a wonderful new tool that allows teachers to make videos more interactive by adding questions, polls, discussions, and more to YouTube, Vimeo, and uploaded videos. It's an excellent resource and it is now available completely free for basic users!
If you're looking to make classroom videos more interactive, or attempting to flip your class by providing instruction outside of the classroom, Zaption is the perfect tool for you. It's got an easy-to-use interface, tons of options for adding questions and interactivity, and great reporting for analyzing your students' responses and answers. Before we start, you can click here to see an example of a Zaption "Tour." (You will need a Zaption login to check it out though, could be the perfect opportunity to sign up for a free trial!)
If you decide you are interested in trying Zaption, you can sign up for a free basic account and then decide later if you want to pay the $79/year for a premium account. After you signup, you'll be prompted to create your first tour!
Get Started Creating a Tour!
You'll need to give your tour a name (which you can change later) and then you'll be at the main editing screen. From here, you can drag in new videos, questions, response prompts, discussions, drawings, images, or anything else you want to add to make your video more interactive!
The Zaption Editing Screen
The best way to start is by adding a video you want to use. Click the orange "Add Videos" tab on the left and then you'll be able to search YouTube, Vimeo, or upload your own videos Once you find the video you want, you can drag it into the editing area.
Adding Videos to Your Tour
Before you start adding questions and response prompts, you can also trim your video, in case you don't want students to see the whole thing. Click on the "gear/settings" icon at the top right of your video and then you'll be able to mark where you want the clip to begin and end. If that's confusing, here's a great video tutorial from Zaption on how to do it.
Shorten the Clip by Marking the Start and End Points
You can also duplicate the clip from the same screen, in case you want to have a variety of clips from multiple parts of the video.
Once you've got your video trimmed down, and added any other videos you would like to use in the tour, it's time to start adding questions and response-prompts! There are a total of 12 different elements you can add to your tour:
To add an element, simply drag it into the editing screen and that's it! Zaption will prompt you for whatever information you may need to add, but it's all really easy to use.
I think the elements are all pretty self-explanatory, but if you have questions you can always send me a message or check out their video tutorials. The only one that might not make sense is the "Jump" which can be used to skip or jump over a portion of a video.
Dragging Elements to Insert them in your Tour
Zaption Will Prompt You To Add Information
They really have some great element options, aside from the expected multiple choice questions and text responses. The discussion element is great for getting students to talk and interact about the video content, and I really like the drawn response also (check out the example tour at the top for a good example of that element in action).
Adding a Discussion to Your Zaption
Once you're finished creating your tour, just click the yellow "Publish" button at the top right and you're good to go! You can share the link with your students, or if you have the classroom account, you can create a "group" to manage your class, record analytics, and get a better idea of how your students are interacting with the content.
Checking Out the Analytics from your Tour
On top of all that, Zaption has just announced the release of their new "Gallery" which allows users to share, explore, and use content that has been created by other educators and the Zaption team. Plus, they've made it incredibly easy to tag and search for content that aligns to the Common Core Standards as well. These two major updates have made Zaption an even more powerful classroom tool.
So there you have it, that's Zaption! Overall, it's a great program at an incredibly reasonable price and the perfect tool for flipping classes and making video more interactive. I love the huge variety of elements they offer and there are a ton of possibilities for making video content more engaging and educational.
The site only launched a month ago, but already they've proven to be a valuable classroom asset with a ton of potential. If you're still not sure, I'd recommend giving the free trial a try and see what you think!
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