Demo Video
What is it?
EduPuzzle allows you to use a video from a source like YouTube, and then inject your own notes and questions into the video.
You can put in multiple choice questions or short-answer questions and students get feedback on their responses.
If you create user accounts for your students, you can track who watched the video and you can get their responses to the questions.
The editor is fairly basic but includes bold, italics, underlining and the ability to insert graphics, as well as a rudimentary equation editor that allows fairly complex equations in a fairly easy manner. The editor is simple but effective.
Adding Students to Classes
You can create classes and add students to them.
If you're using Google Classrooms, adding students is fairly easy. If you're not, then it's a pain in the backside. You have to invite students to the class. This means you get a link and code that identifies the class they are joining. What could go wrong with that approach? About a million things. So, this is pretty much a deal breaker in my mind. If I can't create the student accounts in advance and have them configured to be the same as their email addresses and existing passwords from their school system, then it's not going to fly.
You can configure the videos to not allow the user to skip ahead if you really want them to watch the whole video (or at least text their friends while the video plays in the background) . Combined with the injected questions, it's a good way of seeing who watched the video and paid attention.
Some Practical Considerations
You can manually mark short-answer questions.
There is a gradebook that can be exported.
The system indicates where the questions and notes are positioned in the videos, so if you allow skipping ahead in the video, students will know where the questions are located.
The system feedback is not extensive, but it's fairly meaningful. It shows:
- what percentage of the video the student watched
- when they last watched
- and you can see their responses to the questions.
How it works
The process is fairly simple. Find a video on YouTube (if you don't have your own video) and get the share link for the video.
- Click on Content | My Content
- Click on the Add Content button that will appear in the upper right of the My Content screen.
- Click YouTube in the left menu.
- In the search bar, enter the link to the video you want to use.
- Click Search.
- When you see your video in the results, click on it to select it.
- When the Video appears in EdPuzzle, click Edit in the lower right corner.
- Click the play button until you come to a point where you want to add a voic-eover, comment or question.
- Pause the video.
- Click Cut, Voiceover, or Questions above the video window and follow the prompts.
- When you're done adding you can continue in the video and add more comments and questions or you can click Finish.
- Once you've finished editing you can assign the video to a class.
Important Notes
Once a video has been assigned to a classroom, you can't edit the location of the voice-over, comments, and questions in the timeline. You have to make a copy of the video and edit the copy and then re-assign it.
Students can't change the speed of the videos even if they originate on YouTube which supports this ability.
If you make a mistake in the answer key for a question, you can't go back and change it.
If you want to delete a question from an assigned video, you also don't seem to be able to do that either. You can only delete questions from a video by making a duplicate of it.
Use it or Not?
It's not difficult to use, and the learning curve is short. The feature set is fairly small but it has the essentials for making better use of video content. That's all good.
If there isn't a good way to import student account information, it's pretty much a deal-breaker; however, the ability to track who has watched and how much they watched along with being able to get responses to basic comprehension questions is really compelling. I just can't completely rule it out.