bradshreff
Today, I spent some time using EdPuzzle, and I wanted to share my experience with it.
EdPuzzle is a website that allows you to “Make any video your lesson.” In it’s simplest form, it allows you to give it a video (either by upload or link to web video) and add stopping points. At the stopping points, students are given questions (multiple choice or free response) or a comment you write. In addition, you can use EdPuzzle to record voiceover and narration.
The interface is fairly straightforward and easy to use. It also allows users to signin with an Edmodo account, which is extremely useful for schools like mine that use Edmodo (because getting students to remember their Edmodo logins is hard enough, I can’t expect them to remember another username/password combo too!). Once they’re logged in, you give them a class code that you generate on your teacher account and they will see whatever assignments (videos) you have given their class.
The student experience is really nice. They are able to start a video and watch through until they get to a question. Once they’re on a question, they can either answer it, or click rewatch, which will take them back to where the previous question was. This makes things easy on the kids, because they don’t have to start over completely, but can also rewatch segments they didn’t get.
When they are done, as a teacher, you see the percent of students that finished and what their scores are. You can also export these results to an Excel file.
Across the board, I really like this platform. It makes for engaging assignments, and it isn’t hard to setup as the teacher. My assignment today had students watching a summary of The Iliad (we’re starting The Odyssey next week). The question element really helped, especially given the fast pace and humor of this particular video. Student feedback today has been generally positive.
I do have one feature request. When you look at student results, they are sorted by first name. This makes inputing into my gradebook annoying, as students are organized by last name. I have the option to modifying their display names, and I could make it their last name, but with 150+ students, this isn’t realistic.
In case you want to see an EdPuzzle in action, here is The Iliad review I made. (Video credit to Overly Sarcastic Productions)