Keeping it novel

This week in my never ending quest to keep my class novel I stumbled across an amazing tech tool called EDpuzzle. I know that I am probably late to the EDpuzzle party, but that doesn't make me any less excited!

So what is EDpuzzle and how did it completely save my classes this week? EDpuzzle allows you to upload and edit video clips. You can search from clips on YouTube and Vimeo or you can upload your own video. Once the video is uploaded there are endless ways that you can manipulate it to meet your classroom needs. 

• You can easily edit the video clip, deleting scenes that don't pertain to the lesson.
• Once you have edited the length of the video you can record your voice over parts of the video. This would be great for review of a MovieTalk or to reinforce other key vocabulary structures.
• If you want to assess student comprehension you can pause the video at any time and insert a comprehension question. Students must answer the question before they can continue watching the video (you can insert as many questions as you want). The questions that you insert can be open ended, multiple choice, or survey. After students submit their answer the correct answer is revealed, providing students with instant feedback on their progress. Here is the part that really got me excited about EDpuzzle--the scores are recorded so the teacher can login and view each individual student's sores!  

I found EDpuzzle easy for my students to use. Students either login using their Google email address or they create an EDpuzzle account (all of the students in my district have Google email addresses so I had them login using their Google+ accounts to avoid having to remember yet another password). Once they are logged in they enter a class code--this is a code that EDpuzzle sends the teacher when they create a class. The fact that you can create different folders for each individual class makes it easy to organize your content on EDpuzzle. After the students completed the EDpuzzle assignment I logged in and navigated to the class folder to view each student's individual scores. This was a really quick way for me to assess student comprehension and they felt like they were getting a treat by getting to watch a video. It's a win-win situation!

I created an EDpuzzle video for my Cade meu Rango MovieTalk lesson. My students loved watching the video again and I got great feedback on their comprehension from the multiple choice questions that they answered.

But how can you use EDpuzzle when your lesson doesn't involve a video? This is where you have to get creative...to create a movie from a book I wrote using Storybird I took screenshots of the illustrations in the book. Next I uploaded the screenshots into iMovie to create a video. I added sound effects and music to make the movie more exciting and then uploaded the finished product into EDpuzzle. And there you have it...another way to make re-reading a text novel and engaging for the students!

What tech tools are you using to help keep your class novel and your students engaged?

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