App smashing is the act of combining two or more technology applications for the design and creation of your project. In 2013, I wrote a blog post on the use of creating screen casts to assist with your flipping classroom goals. Now, I’d like to introduce you to a free, savvy app called EDpuzzle. EDpuzzle allows you to upload your content videos to the platform and then add quiz questions to the video, which will engage your viewers, enhance their learning experiences, and increase accountability for instructional video use to support your curriculum goals. Additional perks of the tool include the ability to crop the video to help you focus on the most important content, creating voice-overs, and adding notes. EDpuzzle also offers a library of videos that will spark collaborative sharing with educators throughout the world.
How does EDpuzzle work? First, you set up a teacher account and upload your videos. You then add your quiz questions, voice-overs, and notes, crop videos, or both. When finished creating, assign them to students within EDpuzzle classrooms, have students enter an access code for viewing, send out guest links, or embed the instructional videos on your websites, blogs, classroom management systems, or wherever else you can embed code.
Conveniently, when you set up the classroom, the data for the quiz questions are collected on the back end and compiled on a spreadsheet. At a glance, you can see which students watched the videos, how long they spent on the activity, and their answers to the questions you asked throughout the video, which is helpful for facilitating any necessary reteaching. The management options include the ability to not allow students to continue watching the video until they answer the question posed at the checkpoint, which is a useful accountability check and motivator for students to engage with the video content. The videos also come in handy when students need to revisit the content for mastery learning, when students miss a class, when working with families/tutors, or when reviewing for tests and exams.
EDpuzzle offers a curriculum section that is categorized into three levels for elementary, middle school, and high school needs. You can also filter by topic when searching for videos of interest. With a click of a link, EDpuzzle makes it easy to connect with popular educational channels like Khan Academy, National Geographic, TED Talks, Veritasium, Numberphile, and Crash Course. Need more assistance? Subscribe to the EDpuzzle YouTube channel to learn more.
I’ve used EDpuzzles in many ways. Most recently, my teacher candidates explored the application for their flipping instructional video projects and to create interactive read-alouds. They had a fun time with the projects and were impressed by how easy Screencast-o-Matic was to use for recording their videos and app smashing them with EDpuzzle. The ability to enter comprehension questions, voice-overs, and notes and to crop their videos in one application was icing on the cake. EDpuzzle is so user friendly, even your students can create them!
Mary Beth Scumaci is the associate dean for technology education and associate professor of the Practice with the Department of Education at Medaille College in Buffalo, NY. She has a passion for working with teacher candidates to prepare them for the excitement of today’s tech savvy classrooms. Mary Beth instructs technology and literacy courses; is an online courses designer, and facilitates technology trainings for students, faculty, and staff. She can be reached at mscumaci@medaille.edu.
This article is part of a series from the International Literacy Association Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).