Edpuzzle How To & Review

My students from last year are scarred by Edpuzzle. They tell me horror stories about how they had one assigned every night in 5th grade. How they did all their reading homework on it. AND they tell me how much they learned from the teacher who assigned it. 

I have also used Edpuzzle in my class. Well, not me. My more tech savvy co-teacher from two years ago used it for a few lessons. The first lesson went great! The students loved the novelty and digital format. 

For the purposes of this assignment, I think it's a good time to give it a try myself. Here are my experiences. 

This tool allows teachers to embed questions into a Youtube video. You can choose a video, for instance an audiobook chapter of a text, and embed questions at pause points. In order to keep playing the video, students must answer a question. This can be multiple choice or short answer. 

The website is easy to access and get started. Just asks for an email. Then it prompts you through some basic tutorials. 

First, I tried perusing for already created videos for the first book student will read next year. They had some. I went along with the video and found the questions to be fairly basic comprehension questions. This might be good to pace students through a text and have a more challenging assignment once the reading was done. 

There are options to edit the video. This allows changing the questions or adding things like notes, polls or reflections. 

However, students are able to skip to each question and basically bypass the content. So this may be a pain point if the program was used regularly. 

I also tried making an assignment from scratch. Start by finding a Youtube url. Paste into a search bar. Then they have an editor where you pick points along the video to add questions. I chose a 15 minute video and added 4 questions. 3 multiple choice and 1 short answer. It was all intuitive and easy to set up and to edit. 

It only took 10-15 minutes for the assignment creation process. 

There are then ways to assign the video to students or whole classes. There is a link to Google classroom here. If I had students to run a test pilot, I'd play with this function as well. But it seems intuitive. 

All in all, I'm happy to have explored this program. It was actually easier to use than I had previously thought. I usually like to pace students through a reading with an audiobook and strategically timed discussion questions. This tool feels like a more independent digital version of that. The downside is students aren't learning from each other in whole group discussions.