Please read my first blog post, "My Fuse RI Classroom Project Begins" for details about this project.
For the first iteration of this project, I decided to address the way my students watch videos. I chose EDPuzzle to make video watching more interactive for my students and to provide me with both real-time and summary data on how they use them. I also considered EduCanon, Zaption and TouchCast, but ultimately chose EDPuzzle for its ease of use and cost (free). It also helped that several of my colleagues decided to start using it with their classes this year.
EDPuzzle allows me to take any video, whether or not I created it, and add interactive elements. I can force the video to pause at any point and present my students with a comment or ask them a question. The questions can be multiple choice or open ended, with the former graded automatically and the latter graded easily by me with the option to add a comment for each student to go along with their response. I can monitor which students watched the video, if they watched any parts more than once, and if they skipped any parts. I have the option of not allowing them to fast forward at all, but for now I'm going to disable that. I prefer to give my students the freedom to use my videos in whatever way works best for them. If they can skip a portion, but demonstrate understanding, I'm satisfied.
In my playlist model, students are typically watching the videos during class. I use the “classroom” view to monitor my class in real time. As of this writing I've been using EDPuzzle for a few weeks in my classroom. So far it has exceeded my expectations. I think my favorite feature, just added in recent weeks, is the Questions Understanding Overview. It sorts results in real time, with questions sorted in order from lowest to highest percent correct.
If I click/tap on a question, I instantly see my students grouped according to the answers they chose (names are masked in the image below).
I can then address misconceptions with that group of students before they've even finished the video. This process is completely automated for multiple-choice questions, but also works very nicely with free response questions. I can quickly mark questions as correct/incorrect and write comments to individual students.
So What
The addition of EDPuzzle has dramatically improved the early part of the work in my playlists, typically introducing a new concept. For one, I know if anyone is watching football highlights instead of Geometry because I can see who is and isn’t watching right on my screen. I also am able to help students right away, even if they aren’t asking for it. Having the data right in front of me makes it easy to start conversations around understanding. Some students have already started to anticipate this process. When they see me rolling their way in my famous chair, some start to explain the mistake they made to me before I can even ask them about it. Talk about taking ownership!
After completing our first unit, I found there were some basic concepts that were addressed in my videos, but that many students did not retain. For example, writing AB without a line, ray or segment symbol over it represents the measure of line segment AB, but on a formative assessment a week after watching the video that addressed this, less than 30% could explain what it meant! Looking back, I talked about the concept in my video, but did not use EDPuzzle to ask a question about it. I will definitely add an interactive question next year.
Let me know what you think in the Comments section of this site. Until next time!