Raise your hand if you’ve ever shown a history video or documentary in class… only to see your students zoning out after 15 minutes.

Yup, I've been there!

Today’s students are used to short-form, high-stimulation content like TikTok and YouTube shorts, so long educational films can feel slow, even when the content is great.

In this video, I’ll share 5 practical strategies to keep your students engaged and actually learning from videos in social studies and history.

👉 Here’s what you’ll learn:

1. Purposeful Viewing Guides
2. Pause and Discuss
3. Active Note-Taking Structures
4. Movement and Roles
5. Creative Post-Video Activities

Whether you’re teaching American history, state history, or world cultures, these tips will help your students focus, engage, and remember what they watch.

Blog Post - Episode 112

Let's Connect!

Listen/watch on Youtube

Shop TPT Resources

Instagram

Website

Join the Facebook Group

Mentioned in this episode:

Social Studies Guided Curriculum

Easy-to-follow lesson plans and activities for social studies - just print and teach! The complete bundles for Communities, Texas History, and U.S. History are available. Click the link to learn more!

Learn more about the Smart and Simple Social Studies Guided Curriculum!

5 Social Studies Guided Notes

Get guided notes covering 5 common social studies topics that are low-prep and easy to use as reference guides, anchor charts, and more!

Grab the Free Guided Notes!

This is the Social Studies Teacher Podcast, a show for busy elementary teachers looking for fun and engaging ways to easily add social studies into their classroom schedule without feeling overwhelmed or pressed for time. I'm Kirsten of the Southern Teach, an educator and mom who is passionate about all things social studies.

These, I love sharing ideas and strategies that are low prep and easy to implement, so let's dive in together.

Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of the Social Studies Teacher podcast. I'm so glad you are here. Tuning in and listening along or watching along today is another part of a teacher question. I pulled my audience a couple of months ago, or a few months ago and asked any questions related to social studies.

If you have them, I'm gonna answer them. On the podcast, and this one I thought was a really interesting one because I think a lot has changed in the last 10, 15 years. When I started teaching, I remember that it wasn't really a prevalent issue because. They loved what I'm gonna talk about today, but now I think with the rise of social media and short form content, it's a little harder to hold their attention, to be honest.

So here's a question. I'm gonna read it verbatim. How can I get my students to pay closer attention to movies or videos about, let's say, American history for fifth grade or a state history? All too often due to screen time, video games, social media students don't seem to pay very good attention. After about the first 15 minutes or so, quizzes don't seem to work or get the students to pay closer attention or learn from the video about the topic.

Good points all across the board. TikTok now holds their attention and it's very short, and they just scroll onto the next thing and we cannot be showing social studies, TikTok videos out there. I don't know if they really exist and it's probably not appropriate for school. So what can we do to get students engaged?

If you wanna show a video, that is what we're talking about today. And of course, before we get started, I wanted to make sure that you subscribe, like, share this content with a friend. I would truly appreciate it if you wanna listen along. I do have a audio only podcast. Wherever you love to listen to podcasts, you can always check it out there, the Social Studies Teacher Podcast, and you'll find it.

Apple Podcast, Spotify, the works, and you could also find a blog post version of this episode. If you just go to the southern teach.com forward slash blog, you'll see it there. Again, I would highly appreciate it and highly recommend that you. Look and subscribe. If you want to watch the video version, YouTube is where you can find it.

If you want to listen to it, find your podcast, or if you just like to read it, that is okay too. You can always hop on to the southern teach.com. Okay. To kind of reiterate the problem, today's students are more exposed to a lot of short form video content like TikTok. Maybe they're on reels. Snapchat, even though I don't think they have videos there.

I haven't been on Snapchat in a very long time. YouTube shorts, there's so many different ways for them to be highly stimulated with the short videos that they can just. Really look at at 10 seconds or a minute and then just move on to the next thing. So long history videos and documentaries may be too slow for them, even though I personally love documentaries.

I will watch a good documentary about really any topic. And I'm there. I'm watching it and just, that's just me. But I'm also a millennial. I am not somebody who is maybe Gen Z or Gen Alpha. It is something that is something I personally enjoy, but not all. Of your students may enjoy it the same way, so even if the content is really great and it's really interesting, it could just feel really slow to them.

So the purpose of this video is to share five strategies to keep them engaged and actually invested in whatever you might be showing them so that they could actually learn from the films and clips that you might be showing related to history. Now, I will say quizzes do not always work. I've done quizzes with videos.

Even if it's just a 10 or 15 minute video, I'll have them answer a quiz with questions at the end, doesn't always work, and here's why. Students might focus on getting the right answers. Maybe they know it's for a grade rather than actually learning the material. So they're just here to find the answers.

That's the only reason they're paying attention to the video. And also something to think about is passive watching doesn't always mean active learning. What students need is structure, purpose, and interaction. During the video, we've got the purposeful viewing guides. You can provide a viewing guide with some key questions or prompts or graphic organizers.

I would make sure to keep it focused and not overwhelm them with too many blanks I've seen and have experienced firsthand where we'd have to watch a video and there's like different blanks and you have to like listen to what the. Person is saying verbatim and making sure you're filling in the correct answer.

I would not recommend doing that. You could instead. Have them circle evidence of hardships that colonists faced, and you just have those options there. You can also have them list three causes of the Texas Revolution mentioned in the video. Or you can have something like draw a symbol for one main idea from the clip.

This can help students watch with intention instead of passively. Just looking at the screen. The second strategy I recommend is pause and discuss. Don't play a 45 minute video straight through. What you could do is break it into 10 to 15 minutes with some pauses. If the video is shorter, maybe it's like a 10 minute video.

You can always break it up into every two or three minutes, maybe wherever there's a good stopping point. I love the videos on what we used to have discovery ed. There was a ton of social studies videos and there were always different sections that you could stop after that section. Pause and discuss.

Some ideas for discussing would be a think pair share on a guiding question. Maybe they might have already had a guiding question there, and you pause it, you actually think about it and discuss it with your class. And the second idea is to have some type of quick write with a one two sentence response, and then you do a turn and talk.

What stood out to you in that scene? What stood out to you in the section that discussed this particular concept? This can keep students accountable and it resets their attention spans, so it's breaking, especially with a really short 10 to 15 minute video. You stop every two or three minutes, which is around the same time, they could probably hold the attention.

From social media anyway perhaps, and just talk, discuss, reset, and watch the next few minutes. So that could be a way to get around the short attention spans with the content they're already used to. The third strategy would be to have some type of active note taking structure. This is different from a fill in the blank.

Page with words that they're supposed to find as they're watching the video. Again, I don't recommend that, especially because not everybody are audio learners. Like for me, I have a hard time really thinking about what somebody told me, and then I have to write it down. It's just too much for me. I'm much more a visual learner.

Audio is one of my weakest points, but that probably is related to why I'm not a very good listener at times. But anyway, you're giving them some options to jot down notes. One really simple thing you could do is have a T chart where you have facts I learned versus questions I still have. You could also do a timeline where they're adding events as they appear in the video.

Another idea would be to have a character tracker where you have them record what historical figures might say or do. So an example for this during a Civil War video, maybe you're talking about the different, um, things that went on during the election of 1860. You can have students track Abraham Lincoln's decisions versus Jefferson Davis's decisions and compare and contrast with that.

So that could even be like something else having a Venn diagram. Maybe the topic is. Comparing two different things and they are filling out the Venn diagram as the video goes along. You could also pair this up with strategy number two, pause and discuss. Give them chance to record in their active note taking structure and discuss, and you can play the video, continue whatever they're watching.

Pause again, give them some time to write down notes, discuss, and so on and so forth. The next strategy I have is to incorporate movement and. Add some roles for the video. So one option is to have some type of quick activity break. Maybe they're working around the room for the activity break. What you could do is assign student roles during viewing.

So have students in groups, groups of three. You have fact finder who's writing down new information connector. They're noting how the video connects to something that you might have already. Taught or they've already learned. And then the illustrator sketches a quick picture for a concept and you would rotate the roles.

So every student is responsible for contributing, so you can have them, you know, be in different parts of the room. So the fact finders are all in one corner of the room. And maybe the connectors are at the desks, and then the illustrators are in some other place and they're just rotating, like they're physically rotating and they're also rotating roles.

Or you can switch it up so that maybe for one section, one person is the illustrator, and then in another section of the video, they're the fact finder. So there's different ways you can incorporate it, but just having some type of movement roles, this can be just a really great way for students to actively learn in different ways for the same video.

The last strategy would be to utilize post video activities that go beyond. Quizzes instead of a multiple choice quiz, you can try maybe a one sentence summary in one sentence, explain what this video was mainly about. So they really have to think purposefully about what they really internalized and learned, and just summarize it in one sentence.

Another idea would be to do top three takeaways. Students share their three biggest learnings. Another fun, creative option would be to have them do a TikTok style caption about the video, maybe of a short or TikTok, about the video that they just watched, and it has to be one minute or less they can use their devices to create the TikTok style video.

Probably not on TikTok, but just in some type of recording. Application on their laptop or computer or iPad. Maybe they might wanna do a quick comic strip of one event from the video. They could even have some type of debate or discussion on a question or controversial topic in the video. These are great activities that focus on processing rather than rote recall with a question and multiple choice answers that you know, some may be really.

Easy answers to eliminate, and one is obviously the clear answer. I know there's a lot of questions and it's easy to do just to, oh, is it a, B, C, or is it D? All of the above. So just something rather than, you know, your typical quiz after a video, you could always mix it up with some fun, creative ideas. Or something super simple like a in one sentence, tell me what this video was about.

So to recap, the five strategy ideas for videos in the social studies classroom that may or may not be a little longer than what they're used to here is what the list is. Again, the first one, giving them. Purposeful viewing guides. Number two, pause and discuss during the video. Number three, using active note taking structures.

Number four, adding movement and student roles. And number five, swapping out quizzes for post video activities that go above and beyond and are a little bit more creative. The goal is to make videos in the classroom an active. Learning experience, not something that they're just passively sitting and watching.

I would love to know which of these strategies you would wanna try first in the classroom. Drop your comments below, and I can't wait to see your responses again. As always, don't forget to subscribe before more engaging free social studies, tips on helping your students. Thanks so much for watching and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.

Thanks for listening to the Social Studies Teacher podcast. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hit that subscribe button and leave a review. I would love to hear your thoughts. You can also find me on Instagram at the Southern Teach. I can't wait for you to join me in the next episode for more teacher tips and strategies.