[podcast]
In this UsingTechnologyBetter show, Quim Sabria will take you through the world of EdPuzzle, starting from how EdPuzzle works to where EdPuzzle is best used in the classroom.
VIDEO HIGHLIGHTS:
0:00:03.6 Welcome remarks to “Using Technology Better Show”
0:00:26.5 Introducing Qium from EdPuzzle
0:00:37.2 Great little app for editing or cropping videos
0:01:42.4 Quim’s introduction
0:02:10.4 About Flipped Classroom
0:05:08.3 Responses towards the EdPuzzle
0:05:53.3 Populations of teachers using EdPuzzle
0:07:08.9 Promotion of EdPuzzle
0:08:53.3 The power of using videos/technology in teaching
0:11:19.5 Where does EdPuzzle best used?
0:15:32.8 How EdPuzzle works
0:16:31.8 How to create a new video in EdPuzzle
0:18:39.0 EdPuzzle privacy
0:21:32.5 Cropping a video
0:22:41.6 Most used feature
0:24:54.4 Prevents-keeping and due date
0:29:32.1 Progresses
0:33:32.9 Another cool feature of EdPuzzle
0:37:07.3 Cost/100% Free.
0:38:52.8 What platform is it running on?
0:40:09.6 Copyright issues
0:43:00.5 Ultimate goal of EdPuzzle
0:44:20.8 Sneak Peak/Something exciting
0:45:49.4 Closing remarks
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
Mike: Hi everyone welcome to the Using Technology Better Show. I’m Mike Reading one of your hosts from Using Technology Better. And with me we got a couple of great people. I’ve got my co-host as always, Blake from McKinnon Secondary College. Blake how are you mate?
Blake: Yeah, very good Mike. Very good very excited to be on the show today, we’ve got a very special guest here joining us, Quim from EdPuzzle and he’s going to talk about his product, the EdPuzzle, which I first came across actually when we’re doing some training Mike in Narra, one of the teachers pulled me aside and showed me this great little app for editing or cropping videos and adding questions in all sorts of stuffs and I thought It was a nice little app, I have a look at it and since I’ve looked at it I’ve just been really impressed with how easy it is to use it. We’ve had quite a few teachers take it on and use them themselves so yes, it’s really interesting. So how about you Mike, how are you doing?
Mike: Yeah doing really good. I just got back from my 10-day tour in New Zealand and I had great time just learning lots from teachers over there. I really like the way there system is organize instruction and that’s been good. I’m amaze to hear that you’ve found out about just a little about Narra, who would have thought that with that training that you would have let something that’s been great. Now I’ve tried EdPuzzled in all of my training sessions around New Zealand and the teachers really loved it. So I’m really looking forward to digging into today’s session and just thinking I had to ask some questions and just figuring out how do we use this a little bit better even?
Blake: Yeah absolutely. Cool, so I mean Quim, I mean over to you. Do you want to introduce maybe the product, what it is to someone who doesn’t know anything?
Quim: Yeah, sure. Well first, thank you very much for inviting me and it’s a pleaser and as you can see for my accent I’m from North Dakota, the U.S., no I’m kidding. I’m from Barcelona and I was a math teacher in Barcelona. Well basically I tried to use videos as many other teachers who are training right now and it was all these concepts about the Flipped Classroom using videos to learn at home so that I could have more meaningful time at school. The Flipped Classroom is very nice, it’s all about Khan academy, creating your own videos but it’s not very easy to implement if you want to experiment with videos because basically where you use a content already created by Khan or other services or you reinvent the wheel to create your own videos and then the biggest problems is that even if you spend you grading content you didn’t know if the students are actually watching the video so there is no accountability and it’s a positive experience. I mean Mike, you know all about engagement and collaboration and you know that the Flipped Classroom is tough for both things because there is no collaboration between teachers and second, it’s not very engaging. I mean if you have a 30-minute video about scientific equations, it’s not going to be engaging even if it’s in a muted video. So we build that puzzle to help teachers and make video that lessons, that’s a basic idea so teachers can reuse online content, free public videos or even upload their own video that they created using any kind of software and make those videos a lesson. By introducing some kind of an interactivity so they can record their voice at any point, they can trim the video and take only a piece of it and one of the key features is that they can imbed formative assessment at any point, so they can embed open-ended questions or multiple choice question, they can imbed images, they can imbed just comments or links to other pages and then the teacher, so they shared this video with their students and they get beautiful, hustle-free analytics, you’ll know if the students are actually watching the video so they can see each part of the video, how many times they watch it so it’s like magic. Believe, I was a teachers, I’ not the technical person behind that puzzle and I’m amazed on what the other co-founder have built because teachers say like “I can’t believe this is true, this is super powers.” And we have seen so many teachers fall in love with the product that it’s actually what we are looking for.
Blake: So certainly it’s been well received here and I think it was really just discovered randomly for us. I mean how has it been in the states? So you are based over there as the uptake being fairly large, are you guys are pushing it, how has the response been?
Quim: So we invest all our money, all our time to improve the product because we believe if the product is easy to use and useful enough and teachers as I said will fall in love and they will share the product with other teachers. It has been very well received and we spent also a lot of time on customer service, we tried to answer an email in less than 30 minutes and so with those two factors, having a good product and an excellent customer service and we have seen the teachers like to help us and they spread the word.
Mike: That’s great. So how many teachers have you got using EdPuzzle at the moment, have you got some data around that?
Quim: So now we have around 48,000 teachers and we have teachers that use it on a daily basis. We have a really good retention rate of teachers on a weekly basis with 55% of them using it and more than twice a week. But obviously this is just how they use it but we care a lot if the students actually learn through the videos and not many of the companies care about that but we think it’s very important to make sure of that and we have success in the long run because if student don’t learn, there is no point on building on that company. So we have seen many teachers teach, just to give you an idea like all the lessons in a month in just two weeks and having 50% better results than the year before.
Blake: Wow that’s interesting. So is that all sort of learning then, is that sort of the way you are promoting on the way that most teachers are using the product through the sort of flipped idea, Flipped Classroom.
Quim: Yeah that would be a good question. We have teachers obviously using it for the Flipped Classroom. It’s a huge trend here in the U.S. and obviously in the world. But we have seen teachers use it in different way so in a blend space, model, also it works pretty well so if you have certain number of students and as in my case, they had really high rates of absentims so you can have those student learn at their own speed and try to catch up the rest of the class while you help the rest of the class at the same time. We have seen also teachers use videos as the central point of the class so they project the video with the question and the comments on the full screen and they discussed with the students when the video stops at certain point to answer their question. So we don’t push neither the content or how to use EdPuzzle, we basically provide flexible tools, release it to you so that any teacher can build the perfect lesson for their unique classroom.
Blake: Super cool. So if we just take a step back and look at you, I mean you are obviously a really passionate guy about education and you come from that teaching background. What was it for you that you see as the power of using video like, is it that you could flip the classroom or is it something maybe more deep-seated about that style of teaching that really excites you?
Quim: One of the things that surprised many schools is that when I go there to talk with them, I always say that I care a lot about relationship and they say “Wait, you’re at Ed-Tech Company. You should care more about the technology of how teachers use the technology.” And I think the technology is just a tool and teacher should care a lot on knowing exactly who they have in front of them and what exactly do they need? If they don’t need videos, [inaudible 0:09:25.6] and that’s kind of surprising from somebody that actually has spent 100% of their time going through videos and trying to convince teachers to use videos. But it’s true, I mean as I said before, each teacher has a unique classroom and they should be able to build these relationships with each one of the students so that they know if they need videos or not. And I’m very passionate about technology because I think it’s very powerful but I also understand that not all teachers feel comfortable using technology and that should be fine. I mean teachers need to feel comfortable also. They need to understand who they have in front of them and what exactly do they need to be prepared for the future and try to give their best so that the students can receive an excellent education and that’s it. And if that includes videos, it’s fine. If that includes I think a pen and a paper, that’s another kind of technology, that’s fine. I think maybe I’m too naïve but I think teachers around the world can have a huge impact using the technology they have in their hands.
Blake: Yeah, absolutely and I think that’s overall about you is taking, you know this show especially taking this technical side of things and looking at how it can have an effect on the classroom and on the teaching and learning because that’s the ultimate goal of all of these stuff isn’t it? So that’s really interesting, really interesting so if I’m a teacher, where do this video really work well, like if I’m looking at you know, do I went to integrate something like this, where I can ask questions and get feedback off videos, where does that really work well? What is the place that you think that that will be best used?
Quim: And that will be a personal opinion. Maybe teachers will disagree with me but I truly believe that video is the game changer. The fact that you can learn at your own speed from a visual tool, that never happened before. Before we had the TV and we thought the TV will replace the teacher but you couldn’t stop the TV to rewind and watch again if you didn’t get a concept. So the video I think should be – that’s my opinion. It should be like a central part or the best friend for teachers because it’s an excellent source of content that can help students learn at their own speed and that never happened before. And with that being said, I had a really challenging school when I was a teacher in Barcelona. We didn’t have access to internet. My students, if they had a laptop at home that was maybe 10% of my students. But that’s not an excuse so I said “Okay” like “I understand that you have a terrible situation at home. I understand that you don’t have access to the internet. I understand that maybe you only use YouTube when you want to look for music videos.” But that’s not an excuse to understand that learning through videos is the future. If want to learn anything, you have it on YouTube. So the teachers should know that they have to teach the student how to use YouTube properly to learn anything they want in the future and I told them like “I don’t care if you have these limitations.” I just want to make sure that you’ll learn this skill that will be necessary in the future. So I told them it’s mandatory to watch this video. I don’t care where you go. If you have a Facebook account I’m sure you will find a way to watch this five-minute video and they found a way so they went to the public library, they stayed at school for a couple of hours in the afternoon so they found a way to watch those videos and learned how to learn through this platform.
Mike: That’s a good point. They often say that students always find internet if they need it. But sometimes when we are talking to schools, they are saying “Oh you know, that would have add equity in people who don’t have internet and so on.” I’ll tell you what, those kids are so resourceful not only wherever – internet sources around the neighborhood that doesn’t have a password on it, you know, McDonald’s free WiFi and I used to teach some of the kids who are homeless and I’d still be able to access WiFi but they connect [inaudible 0:14:21.6] sleeping. So I think sometimes we’re just going to get over our limitations like you say ant hat anywhere, anytime, contextualized learning is such a powerful tool that just motivates students to learn and I think it’s fantastic. And I think you are right, like there’s a difference between embedding a little bit of content on YouTube video into your lesson just to break it up because you know after all where we’re in the digital generation and we need variety. I think teachers are starting to move passed that now from saying “Well, let’s just add that as a different medium and we’ll have a bit of writing and a bit of rating and bit of reflection and a bit of this and a bit of that” to saying “I think we can really start digging in and find some great technology, some great videos that are really well put together that had some great content but well produced and they’d be out of use though” so I like what you are thinking in terms of where this is heading in terms of content and delivering and so on. I’m just wondering if you can maybe share your screen with us and just show a little bit about how EdPuzzle works and perhaps I might use that in the classroom.
Quim: Yes, okay. I hope you can see my screen, this is my demo account and here is the dashboard. So basically the home page where you can see your last assignment, you have some kind of information here to know if the students are doing their homework or not, you can invite all the teachers and you have the recent updates and you will see many updates because we tried to improve the product every single week and here you have short videos that explain – for example let’s click on this one. So you have a short video that explained all of these, like 1 minute, 50 seconds video with one question at the end just to check that you understood the video. And that’s just the dashboard. So from here you can go from anywhere. You can share with other teachers on Facebook, Twitter, or you can start creating a new video on your class, a new assignment or a project and I will explain it to one of them. So let’s start creating a new video and because this is the main part of that puzzle and here we have all the content created in that puzzle. We have videos created and uploaded by teachers here. You can share content with our teachers by just typing their name. So let’s say for example, you know a teacher in my department installed the program and he has amazing videos I could just save the videos created by him and change a few questions and I will have my own lesson. So it’s a great tool to collaborate using videos, also in a school. And apart from EdPuzzle lessons, we have videos from YouTube Khan Academy learns really on National Geographic to that very [inaudible 0:17:25.0] number file and Vimeo Teacher too. And something that not many teachers know but the ones that find this tool is that they can also upload their own videos and that’s great if you already used your own screen casting tool and because you uploaded it here, you shared it with your class or maybe you embed a few question s first and you are ready to track the understanding of your student. So let’s get back to my home page and let me create a video. Let me create a video, so I’m going to use this video here.
Mike: Let’s go back one step. When you are searching for a video can you find teachers who are not part of your school organization or…
Quim: Yeah. Here you have all the contents created by EdPuzzle teachers. Right now we have around 70,000 video lessons created and it’s going really fast.
Mike: Okay so if I create a video, it goes straight into the content library for everyone to use?
Quim: Yes.
Mike: Can you make that private as well or everything is just public by default.
Quim: Teachers can email us to make some content private because if they care about the privacy of the students or maybe they record their class or things like that but we try to engage teachers by sharing their content with our teachers. And because we believe this collaboration can build better lessons – And so let me search, I don’t know. Let’s type something simple. So addition for example, as you can see, we have different videos and let’s say for example. I like this one. I’m going to use it and this video, I’m going to trim it, I’m going to take only a piece of it and maybe I want to take the last part of the video because I don’t like it. I don’t like the first part either and these are in the crop feature and if I want to move to the next step, this is the audio track, it’s grade-4 language teachers or foreign teacher s that want to translate or explain with their own words the whole video.
Blake: That’s cool.
Quim: But if I like the audio, EdPuzzle enables you to just jump and use only the tools that you need. So I’m going to jump to the next one because I’m not going to spend three minutes now recording my voice. And you have the audio now. The difference is that the audio now enables you to go to any point of the video, stop it and record your voice. So let’s say for example here I wanted to report a warm introduction. So I’m going to allow here. “Hello kids, pay attention to this video because you are going to have to answer a few questions and remember to take notes and if you don’t understand something, rewind it.” Something like that, I will record my voice. [Recorded voice playing], so we can see, I’m going to stop it. But as you can see it’s a really fast way to make the video more personal and students learn better if they hear familiar voice. I can always remove the audio note, so with just one click, then I removed it. I can record as many audios now as I want and this gives so much flexibility to the teachers. So language teachers use it for listening comprehension or to clarify some point. Maybe try some vocabulary at some point. So that’s a kind of flexibility we are looking for a teacher.
Blake: Just quickly before we move on. With the video cropping, can you crop there like three parts of that video, can you?
Quim: Right now we only offer just one part but we are studying the possibility to enable teachers to crop two pieces of the same video.
Blake: Okay and what about two videos together and in fact I have the exact query this afternoon, they wanted to make “What’s happened to my life in the 20th Century” you know, through my life of the 21st century. Would that meant a video of whole big events like World War II or whatever it may have been? Bu there’s never a way to sort of put those videos together yet, is there? It’s just one video you can crop.
Quim: Our aim is not to enable teachers to merge different videos because that would make the collaboration piece more different but you can assign multiple videos to the same class for the same date for example and that will give all the students a possibility to watch several videos all together.
Blake: Cool.
Quim: Let’s just to the last part, it’s the most feature by far, it’s that you can embed questions at any point, you just click an insert a question. You have open ended question where the student has a possibility to write the answer. What do you think about – I don’t know something like that. So when the student gets to this point, the video wills top and they will have to answer and we have seen teachers use it in any domain. So this gives also a lot of flexibility because you can ask from one plus one is equal to – and then they give a response to how do you feel after watching this part of the video? So it works for science teachers, for language teachers, for anyone that wants to use the video and get some information from the person that watch it. And then if I have the open ended question, I have the multiple choice question that is automatically graded and the student will receive feedback and when they answer it. And so for example a true or false question, you want to take this true, false, and I’m going to say maybe. And I can always edit these questions. I can change whatever I need. We have here also a science text equation editor, I can insert images, links and we try to keep it very simple so only the tools that teachers have asked us to include in the platform so any suggestion is more than welcome always. So now that I’m done, I’m going to save it. I’m going to change the title. I’m going to save it. And here I can assign it directly to one of my classes. So I’m going to assign it to my math class and here I have different configuration of my assignment. I have prevents keeping and I have the due date. The prevents-keeping is something that many teachers ask because we have seen that the teachers complain “Okay, I don’t know if my students are actually watching the video and I don’t want them to skip parts of the video.” So we created the-prevents keeping because received this kind of feedback.
Mike: So let me interrupt for a second. Presents-keeping is stopping those students from fast forwarding or skipping answering a question?
Quim: Both. I will show you how it looks from my student perspective and you will see it’s very cool.
Mike: Okay.
Blake: Alright.
Qium: And then I have to do this. So I can say “Okay, I’m going to assign this video to watch. So it starts today but it has to be done by next Sunday.
Mike: You can schedule your lesson plan to start in two weeks.
Quim: Yes, yes so we have teachers in September, they had already all the lessons created in that puzzle and the due date feature, and it wasn’t just to assign all the lessons in advance and they don’t worry about anything else.
Mike: That’s great.
Quim: Yeah. So I’m going to save it and you are going to see how it looks now. So here I have the different assignments that I created for this class and here I have my addition and the video, I can change them, I can edit the due date. And here we have some actions. We can embed the assignment into any LMS blog and website. I mean wherever you can embed a YouTube video you can embed a NetPuzzle lesson. The students will watch it in your LMS, blog or whatever and you will receive all the progress information in that puzzle. It’s kind of magic. That’s the kind of magic we are looking for.
Mike: Can I just ask a quick question. Can you put that into a Google Form? Do you know how you can insert a YouTube video and you tried – can you get a unique URL address that might work or something like that?
Quim: Yeah, yeah so let me click here. And here you have the URL, you have the embed code, you can share it on Twitter, Facebook or Email so again, we try to keep it very flexible and enable teachers to use it however they want. And I’m here, I’m going to watch it as a student so that you can see exactly how the students experience this and you will see what the prevents-keeping means. So if I click and I start watching the video [Movie playing] usually the students will try to skip and move forward to the question and they can’t, they have to watch the whole video. If they open a new tab to go to Facebook or Twitter or do another thing, the video stops and when they go back, it continues.
Mike: I like that.
Blake: That’s cool.
Blake: You know one of the interesting things with Khan Academy I was speaking about Flipped Learning two other guys who does it here he was on our show actually probably about a year ago now I think and he was saying one of the issues he’s having is class control where they’ll just open another tab even in incognito using Hapara, well it looked like that they are using – Khan Academy in the videos playing and they are watching it with an actual fact that they’ve got it on mute and they are listening to music or watching movie or doing something else so the fact that that actually pauses and forces your attention into that window, that’s really good.
Quim: And actually we are working on – because obviously the students always tried to find a way around and we have seen that they open another browser. So if I’m using now Chrome they open Firefox to go to Facebook or things like that, and that actually – I don’t know if it’s deployed already but it will also stop the video. So obviously the best way is management 101 so tell your students that you have all the programs that I will show you next and say “Okay, you have to watch this video. I want you to learn through this vide because it’s important for this reason and this other reason. But if you don’t do it, I will know it” and that usually is the most effective way to prevent skipping. But obviously we tried to find other ways to it, to how the teachers use videos effectively. Now I will show you the progress that I think is a really powerful piece of that puzzle. So now let’s say that all of my students watch the video or as you can see here, we have 82% of them that watched it. I’m going to see the progress and you will see what I’m talking about. Here I have a piece of information of my class. I can see who didn’t watch the video really fast so Kaila and Paul didn’t watch the video, Meredith, Gloria, they are struggling with the video because the score is 50% and then the rest of the class are doing okay but maybe I need to check something. Here on the top I have some information. So question number one, we have zero percent so I must check this kind of question and see what happen. Here, well let me go back because I graded it wrong. So I’m going to go to Meredith and here you can see that I have more information for a specific student, so I can change this because one plus one is equal to two. And here you can have more information for a specific student and as you can see here, I have how many times they watched each part of the video and this is very powerful for the teacher because you see exactly where the student is struggling and you don’t have to repeat the whole video. You just say “Okay, you didn’t get the piece where the video talks about fraction, addition so I’m going to explain to you this in the classroom and help you through it. And because it seems that you don’t get it through the video and I’m the teachers, I’m going to help you through this process.” And these are pieces of information that not many other tools offer. I mean if you go to YouTube and you try to get the analytics, you see like 35 people watching your video but you have 36 students. It’s really hard to know who is not watching your video. And if I jump to other students, I can see for example this student, well that’s the student I used for my demo presentation. That’s the idea, so this student watched this many times, this part of the video so you know that you have to explain the first 20 seconds because they are not getting it.
Mike: Well I get distracted very easily.
Quim: Yeah but that’s good. I mean we had a discussion inside of the internal – okay how many times do they have to watch the video? Like one is okay, two is good, we think two is good. Three, it seems like something is not working. More than four, like there may be a problem there and that’s the kind of insights that we are trying to give the teacher on how to approach the next class and with just ten seconds of watching this information they should know exactly what’s happening.
Mike: That’s great. Are you able to grab that analytics information and expert it somehow, I’m just [crosstalk] use it in reporting and…
Quim: Here you have the export grades to see – so you can download it and upload it to your grade book or do whatever you want. So here, another think I can do is I can archive these lessons so let’s say for example this was for November 2nd, I can archive it and I will say to November and that’s usually very useful because I have all the information organized by month and the future will enable teachers to have the progress per month. As you can see now, all the progress is just for one video but here you will have the other data. Another cool thing that not many teachers know, I’m sorry that it’s taking so long but it’s just that I’m really excited about this product. It’s not because I made it, well with my co-founders, it’s just that as a teacher I think it’s really useful. Here I have the project-based learning tool. This is a completely new feature that enables teachers to give the tools to the students to create their own video lesson, so the students are the ones creating the videos and you are the one receiving all the content. And this is how it looks. This is for simple addition, I assign a project to my students and I received all the videos created by my students so I can check my video and the student will record their voice, embedded some questions, trimmed the video to take only the pieces that they want and this is way more deeper experience for the students because they will have to watch several videos on YouTube and they will have to pick which is the one that they think is good to understand the lesson, they will have to record their voice, they will have to embed questions to help other students to learn through these lesson and…
Blake: Sorry to interrupt you there Quim. Can other students mark this or does one teacher have to sit down and watch 28 videos…
Quim: That’s a really good question. We give the teacher the control because we have seen that sometimes – so the teachers fear that cyber bullying can happen through video. So enable teachers – okay, like this lesson I just watched a few minutes, maybe check the questions, grade the video, provide some feedback but if I really like this video created by Meredith, I can save it into my content and assign if there’s any other video to the rest of the class. And this content is 100% private and we try to keep it private between a teacher and a student too.
Blake: Cool, so that was the four sections wasn’t it? You got your question or your videos, my content, your classes and projects yeah?
Quim: Uh huh, yeah, exactly. If I go here to home, I can create the project and this will give the tools to the students and that’s it. Well if I forget something – yeah, you can create folders. I mean you can create folders to organize your contents, so we have seen teacher with more than 300 videos and the fact that they have folders, this helps them organize a little bit better all their content. We have the IOS app for students if they use iPads or iPhones they don’t watch the lessons there and you will receive all the information and the due date that I already explained.
Blake: Yeah. Well it looks very comprehensive and I know teachers that I have spoken to who are using it, they just love that it’s really actively developed I think. One of the big feedback that I’ve had from it is that the development team, yourself and your team are very accommodating for new ideas, new features, so I think that’s always good from – especially for a new company coming up trying to compete with the big boys. That’s really good to see. I do have a question though. Like you’ve got a lot of features in there hate the staff. How much does all these cost?
Quim: Yeah that’s true. I forgot to say this is 100% free.
Blake: Free?
Quim: Yes. And teachers ask me that a lot because they see a lot of value on that puzzle but as you said Blake, we have teacher DNA in all our features because we asked for this kind of feedback. If we don’t have teachers using that puzzle in the class it’s impossible that we get a good product. So we are very open to receive feedback to build better features and that’s only possible if we give that puzzle to a test. Also, the fact that the teachers, all the content that they create will be public for others teachers, it gives that puzzle even more value to bring new users and that’s something that we believe is more valuable than charging a teacher on a monthly basis. And also we have many business models that can turn around content and turn around the organizations like schools or maybe publishing houses. So we know that that can be monetized in the long term without having to charge teachers or students.
Blake: Yeah its’ really interesting. So before we sort of move on, Mike did you have any questions about the product itself?
Mike: I noticed that you’ve got IOS apps, what platform is it running on? Obviously it’s certainly on the Chrome Webstore. Are you running it through Microsoft in Windows 8 or something like that as well?
Qium: So it works on any browser, so you can use your laptop, computer and iPad using the browser but we have seen that with tablets and smart phones, sometimes it has some problems to track the student’s responses so that’s why we started to develop the apps. We developed first the IOS app and again we are a small team, we are trying to learn as fast as we can and be really fast. So we started with just one app even though we have in our world map to build the android app because if we started with two different apps and something is not working then one probably won’t be working on the other one and two different languages at the same time can be very, very challenging. So we want to make sure that we learn as much as we can from the IOS app before switching to the android app.
Blake: That’s great. I got no question to, just sort of a copyright. Obviously you are taking YouTube videos and so on and then you are changing them around and you are cropping and then you are making them available for other teachers to use. Have you had distractions around schools that are those around copyright infringement and so on? Just as the bottom line?
Quim: Yes so that definitely is a good question. Actually you are not modifying the original video on YouTube you are just using the API on YouTube. When you say Trim, actually you are not trimming the video you are just saying where the video starts and where the video stops. When you are recording the voice, actually the video – we synchronize the video with your voice. When we stop the video and embed, the question is on the next of the video so it’s not on top of it. And actually the more the video is used the more views the video has on YouTube because we are using the YouTube player in our platform and if somebody is making money out of it, they will get more views and therefore they will receive even more money. The fact that we don’t charge for it, it’s also – and that we are 100% focused on education, it’s something that works with you to terms of use and so far we haven’t received any kind of copyright issues and if we received one, we say in our terms that if that happens, we have the power to take that video down because we don’t want to get into trouble.
Blake: That’s good I just had a question on that. In New Zealand last week I wasn’t quite sure about the backend technology and how to answer it whether or not you guys were making a copy of the video or just [crosstalk] across the top of the…
Quim: And that’s also one of the reasons we offer teachers the possibility to upload their own videos is because let’s say upload a video to that puzzle. I create a video I upload it, what happens with that video? So that video becomes public to any teacher to use and we say that in our terms too and if I decide to take it down but somebody else has to use it, we create a copy so that the other teachers that are using that video will still be able to use it and that’s something also very important to say because we are trying to create this community that share and create content to provide a better education to our students.
Blake: That’s really great. So what does the future look like for EdPuzzle? I mean it looks like from the very short time that I’ve seen it evolved in six months that you guys are kind of heading for that, our Google Classroom video, that sort of looks like you are going to end up with creating these classes, putting people in and watching them and track them over a period of time. Is that your ultimate goal for this project is to base entire sort of content design around videos and have that entire course work and everything, and is that where you’re heading with it?
Quim: It’s hard to say because it will depend obviously on how teachers use new technologies in the classroom. We have seen a huge trending video so that’s why video is essential part in that puzzle. But let’s say in the future we start to see that assignments online are very useful. So why not include assignments in the EdPuzzle platform that you can share and embed after watching the video? So creating all these online tools that can be crowd sourced and that can be flexible because you can add that to your own class, if that helps teachers give a better education to their students, that can be included in that puzzle.
Blake: Yeah, great so it’s really driven by what teachers are doing and feedback you are getting.
Quim: Exactly but always trying to keep it as simple as it gets, flexible and powerful and beautiful also is very important.
Blake: Solely beautiful. So talk to me about sneak peeks, can you give us any gauze on what’s happening, what’s coming, what’s some exciting stuff that’s going on?
Quim: Something exciting. There are many exciting things coming on. So for example the multi crop is something that we are analyzing if it’s possible. We are very confident that it is and we have to make sure again to keep it very simple so that teachers don’t get confused. And also we are improving the content creation so that it’s easier and faster to create the content. And then after that, well something that I think is going to be a game changer for many teachers that are already using EdPuzzle is that – but that’s top secret. No, I’m kidding. We want to enable teachers to have all the accurate data for a specific month and that’s going to be huge because you will see progress on the student and also you will have more information on is that student learning through videos or not and are they watching and paying attention to the videos and so having all these information will give the teacher even more power to be more effective the next day at school.
Blake: It will be very good to be able to track a student against the class that would be really useful, yeah. Excellent, well thank you so much for your time Quim, do you have anything extra Mike you wanted to add before we finish up?
Mike: No I just want to say I think it’s a fantastic tool. I really like it. I just really like the user interface. Sometimes when you have a free product, it’s kind of like you get what you paid for. Like I really appreciate that you guys at the team have made just in how it’s simple to use the user interface is great, I was just looking on the Chrome Store, you’ve got 100% people who have rated you as five stars which is enormous. So I’d encourage people watching this to go and download and have a play with but then going back to the current store and give it a good rating and comments. So I think I’m just really impressed with your attitude. I love what you are doing around education. I’m really glad to have the time to spend some time with you.
Quim: Yeah, thank you very much. Feel free to grade our tool on the highest platform or on the Chrome Store like that would be fantastic. And spread the word too. I’m glad all the teachers know about it also because the more teachers we get, the better content we’ll be able to provide our teachers.
Blake: Yeah absolutely. So this show is all of that so thank you so much Kim for your time. I know you are a busy man. You got probably plenty of priorities just running a startup in the States so that can be…
Quim: Right now it’s 10:30 PM so I’m just going to watch a movie and go to bed.
Blake: Fantastic. Okay, well thank for your time and we will see you next time on the Using Technology Better Show.
Quim: Perfect, yeah, any time. Thank you very much.
Blake: Thank you.
Mike: Alright thanks Quim, I appreciate your time.
