Originally posted on November 28, 2011
I used to love choose your own adventure books as a kid. I would read them over and over to get the most favorable ending, often skipping ahead to see which way I really wanted to go. Some might have called it cheating, but really I was curious and couldn’t resist finding out what ‘might have been’ (plus there is some research that suggests spoilers increase enjoyment!). I imagine many of our students are the same way, and a bit of mystery might be a good thing to get them to delve deeper into an issue. Choose your own adventure books are actually pretty tough to create and it’s easy to get lost, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to harness videos and the web to make interactive choose your own adventure videos instead? Well, YouTube makes this possible with a little linking and annotating.
I’ve found a great tutorial from Greg Kulowiec (via Richard Byrne’s FreeTechnology4Teachers.com) on how to make a Choose Your Own Adventure Video using YouTube. There also is a nice flowchart on Greg’s blog that you should check out.
I used to love choose your own adventure books as a kid. I would read them over and over to get the most favorable ending, often skipping ahead to see which way I really wanted to go. Some might have called it cheating, but really I was curious and couldn’t resist finding out what ‘might have been’ (plus there is some research that suggests spoilers increase enjoyment!). I imagine many of our students are the same way, and a bit of mystery might be a good thing to get them to delve deeper into an issue. Choose your own adventure books are actually pretty tough to create and it’s easy to get lost, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to harness videos and the web to make interactive choose your own adventure videos instead? Well, YouTube makes this possible with a little linking and annotating.
I’ve found a great tutorial from Greg Kulowiec (via Richard Byrne’s FreeTechnology4Teachers.com) on how to make a Choose Your Own Adventure Video using YouTube. There also is a nice flowchart on Greg’s blog that you should check out.
For me the beauty is that you can create a single shell video to embed into your class page, which will then serve as a portal to a series of other videos, either student, teacher, or 3rd party created. Student inquiry and presentation can thus become an avenue for other students’ inquiry. Challenge your students to help others choose to go deeper.
Suggested Uses:
Suggested Uses:
- have your students create and share choose your own adventure reports
- link student videos together into one single embeddable video
- create a video with links to various other YouTube videos for students to explore
- create a single video entry point for your Flipped Classroom videos. This way ‘distractions’ will be meaningful tangents to learn from.