Gooru Adds Helpful New Narration and Comment Options

Gooru is a great service for creating and sharing collections of educational videos, texts, and images. Gooru currently offers materials in math, science, social studies, and language arts. As a teacher you can create collections, add text narration to each element in the collection, create quiz questions about items in your collections, and share your collections with students either publicly or privately.

This week Gooru added two helpful new options. Now when your students are working through a collection they can react to a collection through the use of emoticons in the comments. The emoticons are offer a quick way for students to express whether they "get it" or not.  You can have your narration (which is what Gooru calls text-based captions for elements of collections) appear in a pop-up dialogue box as an introduction to each element of your collections. See a sample of the pop-up narration by visiting this collection.

Applications for Education
Gooru makes it easy to create collections of videos, images, and interactive websites to use as part of a flipped lesson. Being able to add quiz questions for students to answer as they go through one of the units you've created is the feature of Gooru that I like best. By having students answer as they go through the collection I can get a sense of what I need to spend more or less time covering in my classroom.

Gooru does offer an iPad app. You can learn more about their iPad app here.