About VideoPaper Builder®

Use of VideoPaper Builder® 5.0 is currently limited to a small trial group. If you are interested in using VideoPaper Builder® 5.0 for your own project, please

The VideoPaper Builder® software, first released in 2000, was originally developed as part of the Bridging Research & Practice project at TERC and funded by the National Science Foundation (Grant # 9805289). In 2002, the Seeing Math Telecommunications Project at the Concord Consortium received funding from the U.S. Department of Education (Grant #R286A0000006) to develop VideoPaper Builder® 2.0, a cross-platform version of the original software. VideoPaper Builder® 3.0 was developed also by the Concord Consortium in 2005 and expanded on earlier versions by adding new functionality, including a caption editor and HTML editor, as well as improving on ease of use.

The original goal of the Bridging Research & Practice project was to create an alternative genre for the production, use, and dissemination of educational research. In a VideoPaper, classroom or interview-filmed episodes can be displayed and synchronized with interpretations, transcriptions, closed captions, images of student work, clarifying diagrams, or other pieces of information that expand the events, portraying their full complexity. The project conjectured that teachers, researchers and other communities interested in education could use VideoPapers to make their conversations more grounded in actual events, more insightful, and more resistant to oversimplifications.

Since the original VPB software release, VideoPapers have been developed by teachers, researchers, and students; they have been used as part of class projects, for sharing during professional development sessions, for conference presentations, and as an alternative form of research publication. Information Technology in Science Inquiry: Probes and Models Across the Curriculum (Grant #ESI-0624718) was a comprehensive ITEST funded by the National Science Foundation project for middle and high school teachers used VideoPaper Builder 3.0 to capture and discuss classroom interactions with their colleagues. In 2011, VideoPaper Builder® (4.0) was upgraded to allow a secure site for all the videos to be stored and accessed by teachers in the follow-up ITEST Innovative Technology in Science Inquiry: Scale Up (Grant #DRL-0929540) project also funded by the National Science Foundation for elementary, middle and high school teachers. This software allows all VideoPapers to be designed and shared with permissions online by the teachers. In 2016, VideoPaper Builder® (5.0) was upgraded to use Amazon’s video service in the cloud so we can encode all current and popular video types. This upgrade was supported by NSF-funding through a Teaching Environmental Sustainability: Model My Watershed (Grant # DRL-1417722) project for middle and high school teachers.