Wednesday, December 23, 2015

My favorite tool for delivering YouTube content to my students

My favorite tool for delivering YouTube content to my students is EDpuzzle.
Students can drift-off when you are showing videos on the screen in front of your classroom.  That's why it's a better practice to deliver the videos directly to your students on their personal devices or computers.  EDpuzzle lets you take online videos, clip them to the length you want, and then make them interactive.  Here's your workflow.

First, you search and select the video you want to use from one of EDpuzzle's ten video channels.




















Second, you customize the video using the four editing tools.




The scissors icon lets you crop the length of your video.  The microphone icon let you replace the entire audio track with your own voice recording.  The speaker icon lets you pause the video and insert your own audio note.  The question-mark icon lets you pause the video to insert questions in three formats: open-ended, multiple choice, or poll questions.





When you save your edited video you can assign it to a teacher-created class, or share it with anyone via a link or embed code to add to your website or blog.










Third, students watch the video you selected (on their devices or computers) and answer the questions you created for them.  You monitor their progress on EDpuzzle.





EDpuzzle also lets you download the results onto a spreadsheet, and has an option for teachers to reset a student's score, which makes EDpuzzle a good formative assessment/reteaching tool.  I always allow my students opportunities to re-take a quiz until they earn a perfect score.






The videos I choose for my students are very short, about 3-minutes maximum.  I embed 6-8 questions per video.  The whole activity then takes about 10 minutes to complete.  We watch only one video per day.  It's easy to gauge when the students are finished with the activity, so that's when we discuss as a whole class.

EDpuzzle is 100% free for teachers and students.  It's accessible via a web browser or its own free proprietary app.



















The EDpuzzle Help/Support Page is very thorough and well-organized, and contains a great mix of extremely useful text and video tutorials.

Interested?  Watch this video (9:05).
PS: Creating EDpuzzle activities now, in advance of certain snow-day school closures, would be a great idea.

No comments: