Interactive Video Aloud

If you are a teacher, you know the power of a great read aloud in your classroom. You have those beloved books that you go back to year after year, because they provoke strong emotions and meaningful conversations with your students. Those books help you teach multiple strategies and best of all, model for students the transformative power of reading!

This year, we hope that even with all of the challenges you are still investing in the well worn practice of opening a great book with your students (even if over a computer) and reading aloud with stopping points for thinking aloud, prompting and reflection.

What is Interactive Video Aloud?

Consider all of the great teaching moves and learning opportunities with a great read aloud. And now picture the same process, but instead your text is a short compelling video rather than a picture or chapter book. Interactive Video Aloud is a process where teachers engage students in academic discourse around a shared video. This process invites students to do the rich thinking – inferring, synthesizing, analyzing part to whole relationships etc, that then can name and then apply to print texts they are reading.

Have you ever watched a movie with someone who has already seen it and they comment on scenes throughout the whole show? If you have that friend (or ARE that friend) you know it’s not the way to enjoy a film. Similarly, the first time you share a video with your students, we suggest you do so for ENJOYMENT.

Let the students experience the full video, before trying to use it for deeper work. Once students have experienced the video, they might have their own thoughts and reflections to share initially. Depending on your time, encourage them to share. Then you’ll want to watch the video again, this time offering students certain lenses to look for, stopping the video at certain points to highlight authors craft, mood, character trouble etc.

Why should I include Interactive Video Aloud?

1. ​It scaffolds students to deeper analysis &  interpretation. Students who aren’t quite transferring skills can practice doing that work with a video as a text first.  This is especially supportive of English Language Learners. 
2. It is engaging for all students  : Video aloud isn’t just for kids who need more support. This is a process that helps all students want to show up!
3. It is a tool that transfers to in-person, remote and hybrid learning! Finally, with our time and teaching tools being stretched in new ways this year, we have found short videos are incredible versatile. 

Where can I get short engaging videos?

We love Disney Pixar shorts! The video above is from the a recent advertisement in the UK and it moved a group of teachers to tears when we watched it together. We discussed how you could use it with a class to talk about character change, relationships between characters, theme, mood, how setting affects the mood of the story and more! Just three minutes and we were ready to create stopping points and bring our students int.  You can find that specific video here. ( Just make sure to grab some tissues).

But if you are looking for videos that have been vetted by teachers, then you’ve got to check out this padlet from Hannah Kolbo at TCRWP. They were selected with 4th graders in mind who are doing a unit on Literary Analysis. However, we’ve watched each video ourselves and can see lots of possibilities for classroom use beyond that specific unit.

We would love to hear how this process works in your classroom! Off you go, teachers 🙂