Check it Out: Xtranormal’s Educator Platform in Action

The response to our recently-launched Educator platform has been fantastic. We’re seeing more and more classrooms take advantage of its unique feature set, ideal pricing, and specific teacher controls every day, so we thought we’d start asking a few to share their experiences so far.

Erik, an Instructional Consultant who helps multiple schools plug into new learning technologies, was nice enough to let us glimpse at one of his teacher dashboards. We were impressed right away.

The Setup

The teacher seemed to instantly catch on to the full use of our educator tools:

• In addition to his teacher account, he’d set up access to 25 student accounts (for just fifty cents each!)

• He created a Class in his teacher dashboard (here, a setup for a 9th Grade Math Class)

• The class already had its first assignment, titled “Laws of Exponents”, with a clear start and due date visible to any student in the class.

• With no restrictions by the teacher, the students were able to use all actors and sets from every Xtranormal collection for this assignment (without having to worry about Xtranormal Points or other aspects of our regular movie maker).

The Results

The most impressive part wasn’t necessarily hearing students explain math to us (though that was great — admittedly, it had been quite a while since we brushed up on our laws of exponents ), it was hearing students add their own voice to the lesson — applying what they’d learned in new ways that aren’t found in your average lecture, or explaining things from their point of view.

“Who ever knew we would use math in a real-life situation?”

– One student’s movie’s ending line, after two actors use the laws of exponents at a convenience store.

Little touches like this were everywhere, like the cautionary description one group applied to their movie when submitting it. “In this movie you’ll learn not to make the dumb mistake of thinking that powers are the bases multiplied by the exponents. ”

Playing the movie, one of the two actors makes this mistake and is corrected by the other, all in everyday dialogue that could happen between any two people.

View of a student movie from the Teacher Dashboard. A space is provided for the teacher to add Grading Notes or general Comments that only the student can see.

But our favorite student submission for the assignment had to be “Bob & Mary: Math Class!”

With the classroom to themselves, Bob works up the courage to ask Mary for help with the laws of exponents. Mary explains how easy they are, but Bob ends up interrupting to correct her at one point.

“Then why did you ask for my help?” she says. “Well, because I wanted to talk to you,” Bob replies while smiling.

Smooth move, Bob!

Now there’s a Math lesson worth paying attention to!

With the assignment over and all of his student submissions in, Erik is free to apply feedback and grading right on each student’s movie (again, with feedback only being visible to that student’s account, not the whole class). When finished, Erik could modify the number of student setups on his Teacher account any time he’d like, or even opt for having no students at all, giving him unlimited teacher access to the entire Xtranormal service and unlimited publishing at the $10 base rate.

Sounds like Erik has other plans though — at the time we were writing this, he let us know he was setting up assignments for all ranges of classes, including 6th grade English and 12th grade Law. Great! We really appreciate the peek into the classroom, Erik, and hope the other students enjoy these assignments as much as we have

How about you? Do you have any stories to tell or general questions about the Educator Platform? Let us know here, or feel free to access the full walkthrough of the platform in our Help areas if you need more info.

Otherwise, here’s hoping this info helped increase your knowledge of our Educator platform exponentially.

Skyler