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EDpuzzle: Like Video in the Classroom 2.0

February 6, 2014February 10, 2014Kelly Tenkely4 Comments10097 views

What it is: EDpuzzle is a neat new educational site to help you better utilize video in your classroom for learning. You can find and crop video to use only what you need, add audio notes within the video or do some voice over work for a video, and you can embed questions throughout the video to track student understanding. EDpuzzle collects data as students watch and interact with the video. You can see if and when a student watched the video, and see the progress of all students through the answers to embedded questions.

How to use EDpuzzle in your classroom: What makes EDpuzzle great is the level of freedom given in cropping, sharing, and tracking video use in the classroom. EDpuzzle enhances the “flipped” classroom by allowing you to embed formative assessment directly into your videos. As students watch, you can check understanding and ensure active watching vs. passive watching. In a flipped scenario, this gives you the ability to completely tailor a lesson the next day based on the formative assessment results you get from homework. This is truly utilizing assessment to inform instruction (which is the point of assessment!).

EDpuzzle can be used in conjunction with videos that you have made for your students, or with videos that you find. I like using video to introduce students to a brand new topic or idea. Well-created video has the ability to quickly and succinctly help students dive into new learning and formulate new questions and lines of inquiry. For example, when Anastasis Jr. High started our last inquiry block about “How the World Works” and explored the topic of food and farming, they started by watching the documentary Food, Inc. This was a great way to launch their thinking and lines of questioning about where our food comes from. Out of that video, students chose different lines of inquiry to explore and research. EDpuzzle would be 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.

For primary teachers, EDpuzzle could be used as part of a guided reading center. YouTube has lots of great read-along videos. (You can also create your own based on class reading!) Use these videos along with EDpuzzle to check for comprehension. As the video plays, embed questions to check for understanding. Students can independently go through the guided reading (or Close reading) activity, while you work one-on-one with other reading groups. Rotate the reading groups throughout the week so that each student gets the opportunity to go through the EDpuzzle guided reading activity, and each group gets one-on-one time with you. This is a fantastic way to maximize your time and get valuable feedback from all student learning. EDpuzzle could also be used in this way as a science center (with a video pertaining to an experiment or new learning), a math center, etc. I love using center rotations because it ensures that I have time to work closely with each group.

For secondary students, use EDpuzzle is a great way to check for understanding. It is also a wonderful way for students to create and demonstrate understanding. EDpuzzle would be ideal for sub days. I always dreaded being away from the classroom because it was essentially a lost day. Even if the substitute did EXACTLY what I asked, I missed the opportunity to see my students work and think. EDpuzzle would give you the ability to “teach” remotely and embed the same questions and promptings you would give if you were live in the classroom. While you won’t get to hear all of the discussion, you will have some feedback to better understand how your students were thinking.

With documentary-type videos, EDpuzzle can be used to embed writing prompts. Record a prompt throughout the video so that students can pause and write out their reflections and thoughts. I find that good documentaries are often SO packed full of good things that by the end of the video, only the last 10 minutes get well-reflected on. The documentary Baraka would be an incredible video to do this with!

Have you seen Vi Hart’s YouTube channel? I am obsessed! I love the way that she goes through math in a casual stream-of-conscious type approach. Embed related practice math problems based on the topics that Vi is sharing in her videos. As students get those light-bulb moments of, “oh, that is how that works!” capitalize on the new understanding by giving them a place to put it into practice and try it out.

Do you record your students learning? EDpuzzle could be a fantastic way to record audio feedback to the videos that they upload. These can then be shared with parents and students for review.

Tips: Don’t have access to YouTube at school? No worries! You can still use EDpuzzle with your students. EDpuzzle lets you search for video by topic, or pull video from Khan Academy, Learn Zillion, National Geographic, TED, Veritasium, and Numberphile as well. LOTS of incredible learning just waiting to happen!

First Day of School: Anastasis Academy #standagain

August 22, 2011Kelly Tenkely14 Comments3541 views

Today was one for the books. We did it! We opened a school with a radical new vision for what a school should look like in light of learning. It was a truly great day!

Of course there were some bumps (that is to be expected with ANY first day of school) but I have to say, when you surround yourself with incredible people it is hard to go wrong. When I say that we built a dream team it is not an exaggeration. These are true teachers, masters at what they do because each of them is a linchpin. They don’t wait around for someone to tell them what to do, they exude greatness and encourage the same in their students.

We started our day the way we will start every day at Anastasis Academy, with a community mile walk. We call this a community walk because families are invited to do it with us. Every family joined us today. I know that won’t be the case every day but it was an incredible start to the year to see a whole community walk together.

After the walk, the community gathered for a blessing for the year from our Board Members. These are people who have poured into us and mentored us in so many ways. We couldn’t be where we are without our board and the people it represents.

Today there were discussions about community, what it means to properly manage freedom and how to be a friend. The children are incredibly perceptive and these discussions led to some pretty profound insights from the students. One fourth grader noted “Freedom requires a lot of responsibility.” Students seemed to grasp that freedom doesn’t mean that we get to do whatever we want when we want to. It requires something of us. There were discussions about what this freedom looks like within our school community, what this freedom looks like in learning and what this freedom looks like in our technology use with the iPads.

The iPads are still a novelty for many of the students. They wanted to do EVERYTHING on the iPads all at once because they could. “Let’s play a game, listen to music, and have a video going all at once!!” I suspect that the novelty will wear off as students come to realize that the iPad isn’t just a once-in-a-while privileged but something that they can learn with all the time. One of my favorite moments of the day was when some eighth grade boys came up from lunch having an argument about which was bigger: a liter or a gallon. Their first instinct wasn’t to use their iPads and Google the answer, but to ask an adult. They are still in the mindset that adults hold all of the knowledge of the world. It was a great time for us to shrug our shoulders and remind them that they had the whole world at their fingertips and could discover the answer themselves.

We had some fun whole-school activities built into the day. Before school each teacher wrote 10 things about themselves. Each item was printed out on a separate piece of paper. These were spread out on the floor and students were to choose an item and match it to the teacher they thought it belonged to. Each teacher stood in a different corner and the students set off trying to match talents, passions and fears to the correct teacher. After they had correctly placed all of the items, each teacher took a moment to go through their stack, introducing themselves to the students. The kids asked great follow-up questions and were excited that many of their own passions, interests and fears were reflected in those leading them in learning this year. It was so much fun to see students faces light up when teachers said things like “I love Star Wars” or “I love to play basketball”. They begged for proof when we shared secret talents “touching our tongue to our nose”. They shared a special bond when they found out that even adults have fears. (Mine is taxidermy-true story.)

Because we are in a brand new building, we had to come up with a way of helping kids find things like bathrooms, drinking fountains, classrooms, playgrounds, lunchroom, etc. I thought a scavenger hunt would be a fun way to do this. Since I am a HUGE geek, I decided to do this techy style with QR codes. Each team (classroom) got 10 QR codes that led them to clues with each student in charge of one clue. Students downloaded the free Scan app and scanned the QR codes to receive a clue. As a team, they worked together to solve the clue to find different areas in the building. When they solved the clue they took a picture of the answer using the camera app. At the end of the hunt, students added up their points. All ages had fun with the hunt!

I deemed the day a success when, at the end of the day, I overheard siblings use their iPad to FaceTime with their dad. He asked how the first day was and both answered, “great! We had fun!”. The first grader went on to enthusiastically tell her dad about the scavenger hunt that she went on and the pictures that she took. The seventh grader added some additional details about how the QR codes worked. Both talked about relationships with teachers and students. To have that on the first day of a new school is telling. We have a great team.

Passwords may have been missing, permissions needed to be configured but all in all it was a fantastic success! I can’t wait to see what the year brings.

Onward.

Jigsaw Planet

August 20, 2008August 21, 2010Kelly Tenkely1 Comment15726 views

What it is: Well, it is the first week of school which for me means that it is rules week. Every teacher has to go over the rules at some point and it is usually met by major groans from students. This year I approached rules week differently. I used an awesome site called Jigsaw Planet to turn my rules into jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw Planet is a site that makes it simple to create custom jigsaw puzzles. Just upload a jpeg image to the site, choose how many pieces you want, what shape you want the pieces to be and Jigsaw Planet does the rest. You instantly have a custom interactive puzzle for your students to play! The puzzles can be saved for your own account, shared with students via a url, or embedded into your classroom website for easy access.

How to integrate Jigsaw Planet into the classroom: Jigsaw Planet puzzles are AMAZING to use with an interactive whiteboard! Each puzzle is timed as you put it together, split students into teams to see which team can complete the puzzle the fastest. Instead of the typical PowerPoint type presentation to teach students facts, create a puzzle for them to put together and have them read the fact once the puzzle has been completed. Turn your classroom rules into a series of jigsaw puzzles for students to put together. Honor your star student of the week by creating a puzzle of that student, just take a picture of the student and upload to Jigsaw Planet. Put the puzzle of the student on your classroom website to honor them. Students can use Jigsaw Planet to create their own puzzles. This is a great place for them to study, they can upload spelling words, math facts, maps, etc. Students will love creating their own jigsaw puzzles, if they have their own blog or website they can embed the puzzles right into their online space. If you have a projector or an interactive whiteboard, have students create a puzzle all about them. They can create a collage of things they like in a presentation program, take a screen shot of it, and upload the puzzle to Jigsaw Planet. Students can put together each other’s puzzles and guess who the student is based on the pictures. This would be a great getting to know you activity!

Tips: I split students into two teams. Each team would complete a puzzle using our new Mimio interactive whiteboard, the fastest time was the winner of that round. When the puzzle was completed, students would read the rule and we would discuss in depth. This made rule day fun for the kids and much more enjoyable for me!

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Leave a comment and share how you are using Jigsaw Planet in your classroom.