In flipped learning, the pre-class individual work is often in the form of viewing a video, which contains the (new) key concepts to be delved into in the upcoming classroom lesson. Very often, teachers may want to use a quiz to either check their students’ understanding of the video content, or ensure that the students have done the pre-work. To do that, teachers may provide students with 2 links: one to the video itself, and the other to the quiz. In practice, there are apps which combine an instructional video and a quiz in one and the same creation. In such cases, students only need to work with one link. This article introduces 4 such apps.
I. TED-ED
TED-ED is part of the TED platform, which is well-known for its huge bank of quality talks delivered by experts from various walks of life. In its earliest version, TED-ED allowed users, mostly teachers, to embed an existing TED talk video into a lesson which they had created. They would then insert questions into the video, and share the lesson link with their students. The students would follow the link, view the video, and answer the questions. But there was no way for teachers to monitor their students’ progress or see their responses.
TED-ED has undergone a lot of improvements in recent years, which are:
a. Besides TED talks, teachers can also make use of Youtube videos when creating a TED-ED lesson.
b. Teachers can crop the video (from TED.com or Youtube) they have imported into a TED-ED lesson.
c. Teachers can insert M.C questions, open answer questions, and discussion questions into a lesson.
d. Teachers can also choose from the published TED-ED lessons and customise them for using with their own students.
e. For each TED-ED lesson created, there is now a Lesson Page where the teacher can monitor the students’ progress, such as who has viewed the video, and their responses to the open answer questions and the discussion topic.
A TED-ED lesson can be used as a more extended pre-class task for flipped learning, as it follows the following procedural framework:
1. Let’s begin – an introduction to the video topic
2. Think – MC questions and open answer questions for while-viewing
3. Dig Deeper – additional information on the topic
4. Discussion – something for students to discuss after viewing the video
5. And Finally – closing thoughts, reminders, etc.
II. EDPUZZLE and PLAYPOSIT
The biggest difference between these two apps and TED-ED is that with TED-ED, the inserted questions are not timed along the video so that the viewer has to click the next question, then the next question, and so on, while following the progress of the video. With Edpuzzle and Playposit, the questions are inserted into the video itself. In other words, the teacher who is creating a viewing unit decides when each question should appear in the video. When a question pops up, students have to respond to the question before they can continue the viewing.
In my view, the timed (Edpuzzle and Playposit) and untimed (TED-ED) model each has its own advantages and disadvantages. But perhaps with pre-intermediate level learners, the timed model is easier to handle. And between Edpuzzle and Playposit, there are a lot more similarities than there are differences. Both allow teachers to:
- import Youtube videos and upload their own videos;
- create classes;
- view students’ performances in the gradebook;
- re-use and customise the built-in units created by other teachers; and
- link the created video units with Google Classroom.
Perhaps the only difference is that Playposit has more question types, which are discussion, polling, and blank-filling, while Edpuzzle allows teachers to customise a published video unit (from inside Edpuzzle) by replacing the original audio with their own narration.
III. GOOGLE FORMS
Another handy way to put the pre-class video and the quiz together, especially when the video is from Youtube, is to use a Google form (https://www.google.com/forms/about/). Google forms are easy to create. They allow for open-ended answers (polls) as well as objective-type questions with right or wrong answers (quizzes). As the following diagram shows, all the teachers need to do is, within a new Google form, click on the ‘video’ button, and then type in the name of the target video or its URL. A preview picture of the video will appear in the form automatically. In the ‘respond’ version of the Google form that they students receive, the ‘play’ button appears on the preview picture. Students only have to click ‘play’, and then respond to the questions on the form.
And of course as we all know, Google forms are fully integrated with Google Classroom, so that if you are also using Google Classroom, you need not worry about making a record of the students’ quiz scores!
Conclusion
Pre-class work under Flipped Learning does not have to be about watching a video, but by far it is the most popular medium for presenting new lesson content to students before the classroom lesson. Although there are other types of tasks that may go with the video viewing, getting students to answer a quiz while or after watching the video is still a practical way to check students’ understanding and to ensure they do the pre-work. In this regard, the apps and techniques introduced above should be useful to teachers.