Encouraging Conversations with EdPuzzle

Make active video viewing a social activity

Edpuzzle opens up the possibility for both students and teachers to encourage a two-way exchange, a conversation, if you will, during video viewing.  Any video can be uploaded into Edpuzzle including your own, and they make it convenient to do so with this comprehensive side bar access to multiple video-based resources.

The idea with Edpuzzle is to interject into video viewing at key, strategic points,  prompts that ask the viewer to pause, reflect, and/or respond to questions, all meant to tease out current understandings or elicit deeper thinking.

Here is a video tutorial I created demonstrating how to create an interactive video viewing experience with Edpuzzle:

Teachers can certainly use it to flip their classrooms or to prompt new insights upon a second viewing after new learning has taken place.  Even more exciting though is what happens when students create the viewing “conversations.” Here are two ideas to engage students in active learning with Edpuzzle:

1. Larry Ferlazzo suggests “both my mainstream and English Language Learner students could watch a video and annotate them using the same kind of reading strategies they use with a “regular” text (ask questions, make connections, evaluate, etc.). Common Core talks about “multimodal texts” and videos, especially if they’re subtitled, would certainly fit into their category.”
2. Another example of students using this tool to make thinking visible comes from Kelly Tenkely’s iLearn blog. Students launched an inquiry project by watching a documentary together as a means to generate lines of inquiry.  Tenkely recommends Edpuzzle in this instance as a “good way for students to help others see where their line of inquiry started from.  Students could grab the clip of the documentary that intrigued them, and embed audio to show their thought process as they watched.  Sort of a Saved-by-the-Bell Zack Morris “Time out” moment where they can describe their line of thinking.”