EdPuzzle: A Deep Dive. What Did I Learn?

As a part of our course this week, we had to look into an online teaching tool or content creator that educators could use in their classroom. I am not going to lie, the list of tools was quite big and the curious child in me wanted to learn about absolutely all of them, and I wanted to learn it all right away. This task was a bit much to chew right off of the bat. I realized that in order to actually give a decent review of a program, I would have to dive deep into it and spend some time swimming around.

Some of the programs on the list I am very familiar with. Resources such as Raz-Kids, SeeSaw, Padlet and Matific, I use regularly. But there were soo many more that I still would love to explore. The program I decided to research and report on was EdPuzzle, although I did look quite deep into Flipgrid and I highly recommend taking some time to check this resource out. I will definately be sharing it with my fellow educators.

EdPuzzle.

My first dive was into EdPuzzle. I chose this one because a couple of my fellow educators had mentioned this resource to me in the past couple of weeks and I thought that this would be a great opportunity for me to sitdown and learn more about it.

EdPuzzle is a content creating program where you can create videos for your students, or borrow videos that have already been created, and you adapt the video to meet your instructional needs by embedding your own questions or audio. You are then able to assign this video to your students.

Right off the bat, I liked that the resource was free to educators, you just had to make an account and you were ready to go. The process was actually quite painless, which I enjoyed. With your free account, you are able to create and save 20 videos. I feel like this would add up quite quickly if this was a resource that you would like to use regularly in your classroom. I made 5 videos just playing around and learning the program. Of course, if you want to delete the videos your class has already completed, you can delete them and create new ones, enabling you to stay under your 20 video limit. There is also the opportunity to upgrade for a paid version of the program where storage is unlimited.

There seem to be thousands of videos within the program that you can choose from, on almost every topic that you could think of. The videos that are already within the program seem to already have been formatted by teachers for use in their classrooms. These videos have questions (either open-ended or multiple choice) or voice overs added to them. You can choose to use one of these videos as you find it, you can make a copy and edit it, or you can use the same video and completely tailor it to your needs.

If you wanted to upload your own video, you can do so easily by clicking the ‘add content’ button. You can also record your own video of yourself talking (with or without screensharing) as you walk your students through the concept you are teaching.

Once your video is created (or you choose a video from the provided list or elsewhere), you have the option to cut your video, add additional audio and then add your questions or notes. I found that the notes option might be useful if you wanted to possibly provide the definition of a word, add instructions or add in a link to another resource you would like your students to look at.

Another nice little perk of the program is that you can create assignments for your students. This allows students to respond by creating their own video lesson. You are also able to track student progress through the gradebook feature, but in order to use this your students will all need their own EdPuzzle accounts. You are able to set each question as manditory and you can enable the students to respond with an audio response instead of a text response. This allows accessability to those students who do not yet type or write independently yet.

You may be wondering how you share the videos with your students. As mentioned above, your students will need their own account, but you can share your videos through the assign button if students are already in your class, or you can invite students by clicking on the ‘invite students’ button and a link is provided for you to share with anybody you would like to add. There is also the option of embedding the links into your LMS. Currently I can see that Edpuzzle does not work with Microsoft Teams (coming soon – *sad face*), but it does integrate with Google Classroom, Canvas, Schoology, Moodle, Blackboard, PowerSchool and Blackbaud.

Overall, I think that this resource could be engaging to all ages depending on the content that you choose. It seems like it would be fun, at least for a little bit. I bet the students would really enjoy being able to create their own video lessons and share them with the rest of their classmates. I like that the program allows the teacher to monitor the classroom progress and that you can embed it into your LMS. Our organization uses MS Teams though, so this may add a little hiccup for our teachers. They would just have to share the link in another way, possibly through the chat function in Teams

One of the things that I did not completely love was that you are only able to store 20 videos without upgrading. I mean, it is nice to have free access and I am not complaining, but teachers spend a lot of time creating resources, you don’t want to have to delete your hard work because of constraints. Also, I feel like the ability to add to the videos is quite limited in that you can only add questions or notes and they appear on the side or bottom of the video (outside of the video frame) as it plays. I think being able to add stickers, or pop-ups right into the video would be a bit more engaging for the students. You are allowed to add in your own audio, but it would be fun for you to add sounds to your video to indicate that a question is coming or maybe something that you want them to listen closely for.

As a teacher, I feel like I would use this tool probably as an introduction tool, or a quick review tool, but because it seems very linear to me, I might opt to find something else that has more options for presenting as well as providing options for my students to express their creativity in their responses and video lessons.

Also, the literacy specialist in me is slightly screaming at the low level comprehension questions that are incorporated into most of the videos I previewed. I actually went on a hunt for a video, any video, that asked any sort of higher level questions. I realize that I was viewing the resource through a literacy lens and that the questions can be tweaked for my students, but this may have swayed my interest in using the program in the future.