New Ancient History Video Activities Engage Students Anytime, Anywhere

History Alive! The Ancient World includes new Video Activities for each lesson. These activities engage students with compelling videos, storylines, and scoreable interactions that challenge them to become active learners. Let’s walk through an example!

Compelling Video Storylines

Each Video Activity introduces a compelling storyline through videos full of rich visuals, primary sources, and timelines. Students take on various roles—such as archaeologists, photojournalists, and detectives—to immerse themselves in the activity.

For example, in the lesson Unlocking the Secrets of Mohenjodaro, the Video Activity takes students on a helicopter tour of the Indus River Valley. Students explore the geography of the region and examine the ruins of civilizations.

Engaging Interactions

After watching a video, students complete a series of interactions. The interactions involve digging into the lesson’s content and responding to questions that challenge students to show what they’ve learned. For example, after watching the video in Unlocking the Secrets of Mohenjodaro, students examine artifacts and answer interactive multiple-choice questions.

Students may be asked to complete:

  • Multiple-choice quizzes to quickly test student understanding of key social studies content
  • Fill-in-the-blank quizzes that gauge students’ understanding of the videos and reading
  • Drag-and-drop activities that delight visual learners and test their knowledge of key social studies concepts
  • Writing questions that ask students to think critically about the content
  • Drawing questions that inspire all students to creatively show what they’ve learned and connect linguistic and visual concepts for powerful learning
  • A Wrap-Up at the end of the activity, where students review the main ideas from the lesson and answer a final interactive question to demonstrate their understanding

Easy Scoring and Grading

The Video Activity connects directly to your gradebook. For objective questions, such as multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, and drag-and-drop questions, scores are automatically graded and appear instantly in the gradebook. Critical thinking questions, such as writing and drawing prompts, can be quickly graded in the online gradebook anywhere and at any time.

Data-driven classroom analysis allows you to discover how well your class is learning new concepts, both for individual students and for the whole class.

Flexible Teaching and Learning

TCI’s Video Activities offer a flexible learning solution for any classroom model.

Whole Class

Use Video Activities as a class. Project the video and slides and ask the guiding questions embedded into the activity.

Independent

Assign each Video Activity to a student (or pair). Students receive instant feedback as they answer the questions.

Review

Use the Video Activity as a review tool. Students watch the videos and complete the questions to cover the main ideas.

 

The Video Activities can also be used as a differentiation tool to provide literacy support for students who struggle with reading. The videos cover the main ideas of the reading, and include rich images and audio that bring the text to life. Interactive text features such as audio-to-speech, bolded main ideas, highlighting, and note-taking are available at students’ point of use.

Video Activities can be completed on any device. All students need to do is access their individual student account to learn from anywhere, anytime!

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