Editing my first Edpuzzle video.

Here is the very first video I have edited using Edpuzzle.

I chose this video to incorporate into the project I am currently carrying out with my students in their second year at secondary school. This is a difficult age and I have noticed that some students are more demotivated at school after months at home and the ongoing measures. Therefore the project has the aim of teaching the children about what a Lingua Franca is, why English is important for them and their future and hopefully encouraging them to see the subject as useful and not just something compulsory during their high school years.  

While this video is not perfect, unlike other videos I found, there isn’t so much written text on the visual aids. This was one of the reasons for choosing it. There were other videos which contained more interesting contents, however much of what was said was also written on the images shown during the video which would inevitably turn the activity into a reading task rather than a listening one. Besides this, it is an appropriate length (less than 4 minutes) and the speaker, while native, does not have a difficult accent and speaks clearly. The quality of the sound is also good.

At the start of the project, I asked the children to complete a questionnaire in which they had to decide how much they agreed with a series of statements, ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The statements said things like ‘I want to improve my pronunciation’ or ‘I need English for my future studies and/or job’. We then went on to compare our answers and gauged how important we think English is as a class. 

After this, I gave the students some questions to investigate online with their base group or their cooperative group, following the PBL methodology. I also provided them with three webpages. The questions were the following…

• What is a ‘Lingua Franca’?

• How many people are there in the world? 

• How many people speak English as their native first language? 

• How many people speak English as their second/third language? 

• What percentage of people speak SOME English? 

• Which country has got the most English speakers in the world? How many English speakers does it have? 

 

Once students finished their investigations as a group, the spokesperson for each group relayed their findings. 

To reinforce their findings and the ideas about the importance English has around the world, I asked students to watch the Edpuzzle video individually using their headphones. To help students with a lower level, I allowed them to watch the video on Youtube, slowly down the oral text before going back to answer the questions on Edpuzzle. For the high achievers, I asked them to note down words or expressions that were new for them and then to look them up in an English-English dictionary. While I didn’t do this, it could be interesting to create the transcript for the video so that the students can then correct their own way as a way of fostering their autonomy. 

Finally, I asked students to reflect on what they had researched/watched and they had to write a tweet individually, explaining why they think English is important for them.  

During this sequence, I chose not to ‘flip’ the class according to the flipped classroom methodology. Instead, I had students work together cooperatively to find information for themselves using techniques we have seen in previous lessons to find reliable web pages. While I have used the flipped classroom method the odd time, I have found that about only half of the pupils tend to do the task at home and I feel this widens the gap that already exists among many students. 

As with most tools, there are positive and negative aspects to using it. For me, finding and editing the video took me about two hours, which is a lot of time for one exercise (although I realise this one exercise forms part of a bigger task). Normally when I do listening activities, I try to find things that provide me with the chance to create a more challenging comprehensión activity for gifted students or students with a higher level of English as well as more simple comprehensión activities for students with a very low level of English or with learning difficulties. In order to do this, I would have to create three videos. Similarly, when I work with videos on Youtube, I allow my ‘NEAE’ students to slow down the audio in the video. 

When creating the questions, I realised that the question had to be specific to a certain chunk of audio as this is what would be repeated back to the kids if they needed to listen again in order to answer the question. This means that the questions have to be related to specific parts of the text rather than the text as a whole.

On the flipside, using Edpuzzle is a great way for the kids to be able to work at their own pace and the fact that the questions correspond to small chunks of text means the activity is more structured, allowing them to focus more easily on each question. This could be motivating for students with a low level who often get lost when listening to a video from start to end without any pauses. There are many videos which have already been edited meaning chances are, you won’t need to do too much editing. Finally, if the questions are all multiple choice, the tool will correct the activity for you.