Promoting Achievement through Technology and INstruction for all Students
Next Level Instruction With Captions
A question we frequently get asked at PATINS is, “How can I provide captioned media and content for my students?” We’ve found unique situations within many of these requests. These range from wanting to add captions to the morning high school announcements to providing captioned media for a student with this accommodation written into his or her IEP. Often overlooked in each scenario is that captioning has been proven to improve attention and engagement, memory, language acquisition, vocabulary, and level of comprehension for many students, not only those requiring them (Evmenova, 2008).
Thankfully, we live in a quick-changing, digital world that provides us a variety of free tools to generate and curate quality captioned content in an effort to create inclusive, language-rich environments for all of our students.
Let’s start with ways to engage your students. Videos can be a great way to hook your students into a lesson. If you’re starting a unit on fables, try dressing as your favorite character and creating your own selfie video to introduce the new unit with apps like Clips or Cliptomatic, which have the option to automatically add captions as you speak.
Ready to dig further into your lesson? Search for closed captioned videos to support your objectives on YouTube by adjusting the filter after entering your topic. Khan Academy and Veritasium are two YouTube channels that offer captioned educational videos that you may find useful. What if you find the perfect video for your needs, but the captions are non-existant or terrible? Create a free account at amara.org to crowdsource or personally caption videos that belong to someone else.
Now it’s time to give your students feedback on their progress toward the objectives. Using Clips or Cliptomatic, you can record verbal feedback, add the clip to your Drive, grab the shared link, and add it as comment to their digital submission. For a paper assignment, you could shorten the link with a site like bitly.com or tinyurl.com and then write it on your student’s paper. Maybe your students would be amazed if you turned the link into a QR code that you print and include when you return the assignment. Now your students could scan the link with their iOS device camera or an app like QR Reader to find out what have to say about their work.
Do you have students that would benefit from live captions during your whole class instruction? In the latest version of Microsoft PowerPoint and Windows 10, you can activate live captions during your presentations or just simply bring up a blank slide and begin a “presentation” to project the captions onto your screen or wall.
Including captions as part of your daily instruction can greatly increase your students’ access to the content while supporting many functional and academic skills. Furthermore, it shows your students that you are considering and acting upon the multiple ways in which they learn and receive information. Captions are your opportunity to bump up the universal level of your instruction. Because we are here to support you, please let us know if you’d like more information on captioning or would like support with any of these tools or ideas.
About the author
Copyright © 2015- PATINS Project
Comments 3
Jenna - Thanks for sharing!!!
Jena - oops misspelled your name. sorry!
No worries! It was nice meeting you at Ignite! Keep in touch.