Captioned video and transcripts – ideal access and teaching combination

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Wednesday, 29 July 2015 13:33pm

For students with diverse learning needs, the use of captioned content in the classroom is the best way to gain access to context and information for learning experiences using media. When captions are not available, the fall-back position for teachers has often been the use of transcripts.

Student writing the word 'plant' on an interactive whiteboard, alongside the words Irrigation, gardener, farmer, water, soil and fertilising. The caption reads 'will consolidate your message.'

When using captions:

  • Always choose captioned media (see our page Find captioned education content)
  • Prior to the lesson, teachers need to preview the media to search for words and concepts that need pre-teaching
  • Pre-teach any new vocab before screening video
  • Turn on captions on all media used in class
  • Explore ways to use captions to teach
  • Relate the transcripts to the captions

Ways to use transcripts:

  • Use snippets from the transcript to assist with the pre-teaching of words/concepts in the context of the video
  • Provide transcripts to whole class after the screening of the video, as a reference for activities
  • Create student activities such as:
    • Comprehension questions directly from transcript
    • Cloze passages
    • Crossword puzzles
  • Reflection and group discussion activities
  • Create spellings lists appropriate to video content
  • Teach explicit inferential skills, highlight language structures, tenses, punctuation, sentence construction, etc.
  • Revision of concepts and content
  • Where to search for transcripts to support the captioned video learning activities

Ideally use an interactive whiteboard to display video content with captions, remembering to pause the video to highlight relevant teaching points. This activity can be referenced by highlighted sections of the transcript to lead into further enrichment activities.

For lesson plans with captioned content and ‘how to videos’ for using captions in your teaching, search our CAP THAT! resources and our education section.


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