How to Create Interactive Videos, Three Options

This year I’ve become a big fan of the PowerCert Animated Videos YouTube channel as the videos on it have helped me explain some important concepts in my Intro to Computer Science courses. Sometimes getting an explanation from someone other than me helps my students understand a concept a little better. Throughout the year I have either shown one of the videos in class or used one in a lesson that distribute through EDpuzzle.

EDpuzzle is a free service for creating video-based lessons. You can use videos that are available on YouTube, videos that you upload to EDpuzzle, and videos that others have uploaded to EDpuzzle to create your lessons. Once you have selected a video you can add comments and quiz questions into the timeline of the video. One of the most popular aspects of EDpuzzle is that you can prevent students from fast-forwarding through videos.

While I’m a big fan of EDpuzzle, it is not the only tool for making interactive videos. Timelinely is a free service for adding annotations to YouTube videos. You can use Timelinely to add text, image, and video annotations to any public YouTube video. After you have added your annotations to a video you can share the annotated version with anyone much like you would share any other video. You can share your annotated video by embedding it into a blog post or by just giving people the link to the annotated version of the video.

Thinglink offers tools for adding interactive elements to videos. You can use it to add interactive elements to videos that you own and upload to the service. You can also use Thinglink to add interactive elements to videos that you find on YouTube. Watch this video to learn how to use Thinglink to add interactive elements to videos found on YouTube.

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