Adam Mills, OAPT Workshop Coordinator, Teacher - Assumption College Catholic High School
adam-mills@wecdsb.on.ca

One tool that has really helped change the look of my Physics classroom is Edpuzzle. https://edpuzzle.com/ Edpuzzle is a website that allows teachers to embed questions within videos already created from YouTube or other sources. I find this tool particularly useful to help minimize the amount of direct instruction that I am giving my students in class. This allows my students more time to participate in richer educational strategies such as peer instruction, cooperative group problem solving and inquiry based learning.

My students complete a lot of inquiry based learning, and so they do not often sit in class and take notes. At first this concerns many students who are use to more traditional ‘sage on the stage’ type of teaching. I have found that by introducing Edpuzzle into my classroom as homework exercises the students get their traditional direct instruction on the various topics and with my ability to add in questions I gain a deeper understanding into their comprehension of the concepts.

Edpuzzle is an extremely user friendly tool that can embed directly into Google Classrooms or be used as an external website to your course. I have created a how to guide which will take you step by step through the process of creating a question embedded video and how to assign it to your students.

The way that I like to use Edpuzzle is as a summary tool for the inquiry based lesson that my students completed during class that day. The questions that I embed into the video are usually very straightforward to ensure that the students have a grasp of the essential concepts from that lesson. I tend to save more conceptual/difficult questions for students to work on in class, where they have their groups to discuss their ideas with. I have found that my students generally appreciate this approach since it allows them to get immediate feedback on their understanding of the basic concepts before coming back to class the next day.

The videos that I choose to embed the questions in are mini lessons for the topic the students completed inquiry activities about in class. Again this allows them to consolidate their findings from class at home at their own pace. When the students have completed the video hopefully the major concepts from class have been reinforced and the questions the students completed have allowed them to reflect on their understanding of the basic concepts.

Another useful feature of this tool is the data that becomes available as the students complete the questions. On top of knowing if they answered the question correctly or not, you can also see how often they went back and watched different parts of the video, which can in turn can guide your lesson the next day.

Finally, I use Edpuzzle as a review assignment to my students. Edpuzzle has a feature called Student Project (shown in how to guide) that allows students to create their own Edpuzzle videos and upload them to the classroom as resources for their peers. Furthermore, these videos become part of your library which you can use for future classes.

The only possible tedious part of using Edpuzzle is finding good quality video content that covers the Ontario Curriculum. Fortunately there are many teachers in Ontario who have already made videos which address nearly every topic in Grade 11 and 12 Physics. Two teachers that I subscribe to on YouTube are Chris Doner and Earl Haig Secondary School.

Tags: Pedagogy, Technology