EDpuzzle – The Easiest Way to Engage Your Students With Videos

You found the perfect video for that concept you are covering today.  You show the video, but you have to keep pausing it to go into greater detail or ask the students questions to make sure they understand what they are seeing.  You get to the end of the video and discover that one of your little darlings was in the bathroom….THE WHOLE TIME.  And another kid appeared to sleep through the whole thing.  What a waste of time…..

But wait!!!  What if there was a FREE tool that you could use to engage all of your students.  A tool that

• allows you to create quiz questions during strategic sections of the video
• allows you to insert your own images and voice comments
• lets you see how long each student watched each section of the video and stops the video if they try to multitask in another internet tab
• allows you to upload your self-created videos
• gives you a large library of videos on multiple subjects already created by other people
• allows you take and edit videos directly from YouTube, Khan Academy, Vimeo and many other sources
• easily shares your newly created video with any one of your Google Classrooms

EDpuzzle is the easiest way to engage and hold your students accountable when using videos. Instead of having all students sit in the dark to watch a video at the same time, EDpuzzle gives you the flexibility to have students watch the video independently, in small groups, as a center activity, or as an activity outside of the confines of the regular school day. By having each student interact with the video, you are ensuring that they at least attend to the content and interact with it in a meaningful way.

EDpuzzle has FREE features that make it extremely valuable.

• Search – You can search for videos with questions already created by looking within the EDpuzzle library. If you want to make your own video and create your own questions, you can narrow your search to channels like YouTube, National Geographic, TED Talks, and Khan Academy among others.
• Assign – EdPuzzles are easy to share with your students. If you are a Google Classroom user, simply link your class to your EDpuzzle account and you can create an assignment that is delivered right to your students. If you are not yet a Google Classroom user, EDpuzzle allows you to create classes that students join by entering a code. You can even Tweet or email the code to your kids!
• Video Controls – Want to keep your kids engaged with your video? Through some strange voodoo, EDpuzzle knows when you leave the tab where the video is playing and it STOPS PLAYING!!! What??? You mean I have to actually watch the video and not just put it on while I play video games in another window? You can also set videos so that the viewer cannot skip ahead or move on until they answer a question correctly.
• Progress Tracking – Speaking of answering a question correctly, progress tracking lets you see how much of the video a student has watched and how many questions they answered correctly. You can even see how many times they watched a specific section before they were able to answer the question correctly.

EDpuzzle can be a very powerful tool because there are so many ways that EDpuzzle can work for you.

• Flip your instruction by giving students a brief video quiz to watch and complete for homework. That way you can repurpose the time in your classroom to differentiate practice and instructional opportunities based on the data you receive back from the “EDpuzzle” you’ve assigned.  EDpuzzle makes flipped learning much easier as you have the accountability mechanism in place to ensure all students are reviewing and comprehending your flipped instructions.  
• Differentiate your instruction by creating leveled questions, sharing videos of varying difficulty levels, or assigning videos based on interest or formative assessment data.
• Encourage creativity and mastery of content by having students create their own videos and question sets to share with classmates.
• Engage students instead of allowing them to be passive consumers of information.

Now is the time! Get out there and create awesome learning opportunities for your students.