Revel for History: Demo

Video Transcript

Below is the transcript for the video at: http://youtu.be/D0II31kkUs0.

Hi, I'm here to talk to you about some of the exciting features you'll find in Revel in History.

Built in collaboration with educators and students nationwide, Revel is an immersive learning experience designed for the way today's students read, think, and learn. Let's take a look...

Revel enlivens course content with media interactives and videos that empower students to engage with concepts and take an active role in learning.

Students are able to immediately practice course material through Revel's embedded assignment and quizzing, providing students opportunities to check their understanding at regular intervals before moving on.

This immersive experience boosts student engagement, which leads to better understanding of concepts and improved performance throughout the course.

Revel's assignment and tracking tools offer actionable information that helps educators intersect with their students in meaningful ways.

Educators can indicate precisely which readings must be completed on which dates. This clear, detailed schedule helps students stay on task and keeps them motivated throughout the course.

By monitoring class assignment completion and individual student achievement, actionable information, such as points earned on quizzes and tests and time on task, helps educators see the progress of their students and their entire class.

Revel is also fully mobile, so students can read and interact with course material on their devices, anywhere and anytime.

Let's now take a look at a few Revel features specific to History.

Leading things off, students often struggle trying to explore events in a critical way with traditional printed text. Students under utilize maps and often cannot connect individual perspectives with larger historical events.

But with history explorer, students can explore concepts they've just read about by using dynamic animated maps to understand pivotal events and topics. With history explorer, students are also provided richer context of key topics through opening personal anecdotes with each interactive so Instructors can truly leverage maps to teach historical events in a clear and relevant way.

From there, Revel aims to encourage students to explore and engage in the written material and not gloss over pictures and maps that often contain critical information.

Interactive maps and media are embedded within the narrative, giving students an interactive experience with history. Students can process the information in a different, more proactive way and therefore they will encounter more light-bulb moments that reading alone could not offer.

Next, instructors have asked for a way to assess students' critical thinking at points that are advantageous without taking students outside of the reading experience. Students also don't participate in enough short writing exercises that are immediately relevant to their reading—often glossing over questions littered throughout traditional texts.

So with journaling / shared writing, students can both exercise their critical thinking skills and display their retention of material they just read throughout the text. With this capability, instructors can assess students on a more substantive level. Students enjoy seeing the progress they’re making and with shared writing, they can see how their classmates are processing the information, too.

History is a topic about telling stories, but it's not as effective without compelling storytellers and visuals that launch students into and augment the text.

With the videos feature, students have context for a range of topics and events in a visually captivating way within the actual text. Dynamic individuals and imagery, rather than static pictures and text that explain events and topics, help provide richer context to key topics and invite students to explore and read the material more critically. Students will see how historians think about key events and, therefore, students can start to make critical, historical connections on their own.

Finally, to show students how to make connections with historical periods events through the documents that defined those periods/events, Revel has primary source documents.

Documents with audio appear right within the author narrative so students have direct access to those documents as they are reading. They provide immediate reference points without taking the student outside of the reading experience.

And there you have it. That was a quick look at just a handful of the valuable features in Revel in History. If you want to learn more, be sure to check out /Revel. Thanks for watching.