Teaching Tips and Tools: Zaption
The new simple way to make your videos become instant interactive lessons by adding text, images,
and questions right into your online videos!
Sign up for Zaption for Higher Education educators for free!
Zaption is a great new way to add interaction to videos! Zaption’s tagline is to “turn online videos into
interactive learning experiences that engage students and deepen understanding” which is a great way
to get students to watch your videos! The best part is you can string together multiple videos, strip and
edit video/s to create your complete lesson. So, you are probably asking exactly what can I add to a
video to make it more interactive? Zaption allows you to add: open response (short essay) questions,
numerical responses, multiple choice questions, check box for multiple answers, a drawn response
(students draw their response) question, and discussion block at any point in your video. Zaption also
allows you to add text slide, pictures, or your own drawing at any point in the video clip. The zaption
free account for educators allows you to publish an unlimited amount of lessons and track the usage.
In order to track detailed student data a paid subscription would be required at $10 per month for a
teacher, $45 a month for a team/department, or $200 a month for a school. For the purpose of
individual usage the free basic account is more than enough to work and compete interactive videos.
The other fun part about Zaption is that it contains a gallery of other instructor’s lessons that are
available for your use! All you have to do is search key terms about your lesson topic to see if anyone
has already created a Zaption Lesson that you can use!
How to use Zaption easily:
1. Start by finding a video on your computer or put in the YouTube link in to get started on
your lesson
2. Once you have your video located you add it to your lesson
3. Now your video is loaded and all you do is scroll along the timeline below your video to find the
spots you desire to add interaction
4. The interaction buttons are located at the top of the screen and all you do is click and drop into
the slide box located above the movie clip, you can also click on the red box with the plus sign
that is in the slide box to add another video to your lesson. This is really quick and easy to use!
So how can you use Zaption in your class?
1. This program is perfect for videos in face to face and online classes!
2. You can add multiple features within any video or set of videos to have students really become
interactive within the video which can be used for participation within any course.
3. Interaction with a video allows students to stay engaged throughout the whole process, while
you have students working with key concepts from your lesson.
4. Discussion has a whole new shape as part of a video clip and students can really interact on key
aspects of the video you want them to focus on.
5. You can also use the Gallery to find lessons already created for your use! This feature is good
for the education students who would like to search K-12 gallery!