This week we made a Screencastify video and then used H5P to make the video interactive. I think this was pretty interesting technology to play around with. However there were a lot of technical difficulties with embedding the videos and the opened website not allowing the H5P plugin on our individual websites. An obvious drawback of this tool is that it requires (as far as I’m aware) a YouTube channel. Although, you can make the videos unlisted, you still have to post your video to the platform and thus rely on YouTube. This could be an issue if attempting to implement in the classroom with students. I am curious if it is possible to use a .mp4 file instead of a YouTube link to make these videos (maybe that is specific to OpenEd).
On the other hand, I really like the interactivity of this tool. Videos can be useful, but if they are too long or not engaging enough you can lose students’ interest. The ability to add questions, pictures, and other media to “popup” can help spark interest when students are watching a video. Similarly, you can use them to stop the video at a precise moment and ask a question to reflect on a particular scene. I am curious if you can take any YouTube URL and make a H5P interactive video out of it. Are there copyright issues or does it fall under the category of use for learning and not commercial.
Regardless, an interesting and fun tool that I am excited to continue learning about and its future applications.