AI Tool Demo: Turning Passive Video Watching Into Active Learning With SchoolAI
This tech tool can turn any video into an interactive learning experience that engages students—and gives teachers instant insights into their level of understanding.
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Go to My Saved Content.How do you know if students watched—and actually understood—that video you assigned? And how can a tool like SchoolAI help you figure it out?
Video is a unique and powerful tool for learning: It engages multiple senses, breaks down complicated ideas into digestible chunks, and demonstrates complex concepts that are challenging to describe with just text alone. But implementing video inside of a classroom comes with challenges.
Students might zone out or watch passively without actively processing key points. And for the teacher, it can be difficult to determine what students really took from the experience, or if they even watched at all. In this brief demo, Innovation and Technology Coordinator Larisa Black demonstrates how SchoolAI’s Video Explorer tool can transform passive video watching into an engaging, interactive learning experience.
Inside of SchoolAI’s platform, as students watch the assigned video, an AI chatbot pauses at key moments to ask probing questions aligned with your learning objectives. These open-ended questions require students to articulate their thinking in writing, ensuring deeper engagement than multiple-choice questions that allow for lucky guesses. Instead of passively watching, Black says, students are “engaging, asking questions, summarizing ideas, and getting instant feedback as they go.” On the teacher side of the platform, you can monitor each student’s engagement and comprehension level. Clicking the Groups button will prompt the platform to sort each student into groups based on their level of understanding.
Setup is simple. After providing a few key pieces of information—the URL of the video you’d like students to watch, grade level, number of questions you’d like the chatbot to ask, and learning outcomes for the questions—click Launch and the platform does the rest.
This is only one feature of several offered by SchoolAI, including a lesson plan generator, tools to help craft individualized education programs, and a range of different chatbots that students can interact with (like the Career Exploration Chatbot).
Interested in creating instructional videos for your students? Middle school STEAM and math enrichment instructor Jenny Gieras has a few tips. Or, if you want to help students better understand how to use videos as a tool for learning, check out these suggestions from educator Avra Robinson.