Grockit Test Prep

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Better Answers

Since first announcing Grockit Answers in October, we’ve improved our video collaboration tool in a number of ways. These changes were driven largely by the feedback that we received from teachers and students, so keep it coming! Below are video clips (in 1080p HD!) demonstrating six of these recent improvements:

Discussions are now live-updating!

When groups of students are watching the same video at the same time, newly-posted questions and answers are live-updated on all connected viewers.

Embed video search results into another website

When you search for a video on Grockit Answers, you can now embed the results onto your own webpage, like this:

Here’s a short video explaining how to do this:

Start moderating classroom discussions faster

Moderation controls are now more readily-accessible, simplifying the process for a teacher to get started using Grockit Answers in their classroom.

Share videos and questions with your students through Edmodo

Any video, question, or answer on the site can now be shared with others through Edmodo.

Teachers and moderators now receive activity updates

Once a day, teachers and others who moderate videos will now receive an update listing all new Q&A activity on those videos:

Grockit Answers now powers all Grockit video courses!

You’ll now find Grockit Answers powering SAT and GMAT video courses. Grockit Answers also now provides opportunity to ask questions and offer help around every question video explanation on the site, both in reviews and in solo game explanations. Thousands of Grockit video discussions, added earlier this week:



Answering the question that you’re about to ask

We’re happy to announce the newest addition to the Grockit social learning platform: Grockit Answers, a tool for hosting timely Q&A discussions around web videos. We started by designing this for our own videos, but quickly decided that it could have more impact if we expanded our scope a bit. So as of today, Grockit Answers works with any video hosted on YouTube or Vimeo.

There’s a wealth of educational videos available online, but the primary mode of interaction among viewers — short-form commenting — doesn’t do much to enhance or facilitate learning. When you’re trying to grok a challenging lecture from an AI course at Stanford or an open talk at MIT, you need more than comments. You need a way to ask a question about a particular point that confused you, or ask for a clarification or maybe a useful reference on something mentioned in the video. You really need a Q&A site, and you need to be able to attach each of your questions to a particular time in the video. You need Grockit Answers. Here’s a quick video clip (live Q&A discussion here). Feel free to ask questions about this video on Grockit Answers.

Built on Popcorn.js, a fantastic new HTML5 media framework for better connecting web videos to web pages, Grockit Answers displays each question and its answers at the exact point in the video that they are most relevant. As a viewer, some of the things that confuse you are are likely to be the same as what confused others before you. In a time-anchored Q&A on Grockit Answers, just as the question begins to form in your mind, it may magically pop up on the screen, along with a few great answers.

For the educators out there, I’m happy to say that we developed a number of additional features with you in mind. You can create a Q&A page on a video that only you and your students have access to, and you can moderate the conversation to get additional controls and deeper insight into what’s happening. Finally, and most exciting, you can add these Q&A pages to your own course websites (example), easily replacing links to YouTube or Vimeo videos with your moderated discussions. Feel free to contact us at answers@grockit.com with any questions about this.


Start a Question & Answer page for any video on YouTube. Share it with your classroom or share it with your friends. And please, let us know what you think.

Grockit “Official Guide” TV Helps Students Help Themselves

Virtually every SAT or GMAT student I’ve met has purchased or sought a hand-me-down version of the “Official SAT Study Guide” or “GMAT Official Guide”. They are the “required” practice material of any serious studier and are considered the gold standard of each test since they are believed to contain questions most indicative of those seen on test day. But the problem is that answering even the best practice questions isn’t an instructional process. At its core, it’s a personal assessment. While you can learn from answering questions and checking your accuracy, this is more emotionally satisfying than it is an efficient learning method.

On the other end, it’s well-documented in education theory that watching an expert present a solution to problem helps students learn how solve similar ones. Why? Because problems with similar material and structure generally have a best solution path. And there’s nothing more predictable than a standardized test question. But without personal context, lectures of practice questions can get a bit boring or fall flat.

This is where Grockit’s “Official Guide” TV comes in.

Grockit’s expert instructors have filmed detailed explanations of over 75 hours for each the Official SAT Study Guide (2nd Ed.) and GMAT Official Guide (12th Ed.) and organized them by page, test, section and question number. Now, wherever students are in their own practice book, they can find a video explanation of that question, anytime, anywhere. No more starring pages to show your tutor. No more waiting two weeks to get a satisfying answer. This is on demand help for students in real-time.

Check it out:

Here at Grockit, we are trying to break down the barriers to student access to expert instruction. By providing students with tools to approach complex material with a discerning eye and a personalized schedule and pace, we hope to enable students to forgo paying $80/hour for an in-person tutor or $600+ on a course.

In addition to the Grockit “Official Guide” TV, Grockit offers students an additional 75 hours of solutions each for every single SAT and GMAT question in the Grockit database. These can be watched as standalone hour-long lessons by topic (SAT Writing or GMAT Quantitative, for example) at your convenience. And coming-soon, each SAT and GMAT question on Grockit will have a video explanation for students to access in their reviews, anytime.

Any ideas for other On Demand Grockit TV programming? Email us at courses@grockit.com.

We’re Speaking at the Startup Lessons Learned Conference!

On April 23rd in San Francisco, Grockit will be well represented at Startup Lessons Learned Conference. Both Farb Nivi and Matt Johnson from our team will be speaking about the lean startup principals we practice at Grockit. We were pumped to get the invite! Here is a brief event description:

Startup Lessons Learned is the first event designed to unite those interested in what it takes to succeed in building a lean startup. The goal for this event is to give practitioners and students of the lean startup methodology the opportunity to hear insights from leaders in embracing and deploying the core principles of the lean startup methodology.

For a sneak peak into Grockit and what Farb will be speaking about check out this video.