Edpuzzle is a great ed tech program to use for student engagement.  It allows teachers to choose videos from YouTube, embed your own assessment questions, and track your students' progress.  It also has precreated video assessment that teachers can choose from as well.

Edpuzzle offers a free version and paid version.  The free version ​provides almost the same features as the paid version, with the exception of the number of videos you can have uploaded at one time.  

​The training slides below can be used to learn more about Edpuzzle and how to use it to engage your students.  It also contains step by step videos for how to use Edpuzzle and set up your account.

​Do you have any other ideas you'd like added to this post?  Make sure to include them in the comments below.

Seesaw, like Flipgrid, is an excellent way to engage students in learning.  I highly recommend it (even more than Flipgrid) if you teach lower elementary students.  Similar to Flipgrid, Seesaw has a photo and video recording feature.  However, it also has options  for students to draw pictures, write notes, upload files, and add links.  The design looks fun and exciting for lower elementary students, but can start to look too babyish for students outside of elementary school.

There are a number of ways you can Seesaw to engage students.  Here are just a few of those ways:

• ​Students respond to a prompt using an image, drawing, video recording, or audio recording.
• Students record themselves saying their sight words or practicing fluency passages.
• Students watch a short video and then drag and drop answers to what they just watched.
• Students video record themselves demonstrating hand motions that help them remember the meaning of vocabulary words.
• Students draw a visual representation of how they solved a math problem and then record a verbal explanation of answer.
• Students draw on a map (inserted by the teacher) to highlight important places in the community.

Flipgrid is one of the first ed tech programs that I used to enhance student engagement within my classroom.  The video feature allowed my 5th grade students to show their understanding in a different way.  For many of them, it was also a lot more fun than traditional pencil and paper responses.  The few who struggled quickly got over seeing themselves in a video and soon learned to love it too.  Besides providing engagement opportunities, it was also easy for teachers and students to use. 

There are so many ways you can use Flipgrid to engage your students.  Here are just a few of those ways:

• Tell Your Answer: Students explain how they came to their math answer using the appropriate math vocabulary terms.  This is a great way for students to demonstrate math reasoning.
• Summarize It/All About the Details: Students summarize literature or explain the main idea and important details of informational text.  If students have less than 30 seconds to respond it will help them learn to only include the most important parts.
• Start/Finish the Story: Students start or finish a story.  This is a great way for students that struggle with writing to have a different way to express themselves.
• How Do You Feel: Students respond to media (images, gifs, videos, etc.) and share their feelings.  This is great for Social Emotional Learning time.
• What's the Outcome: Students explain what they think the outcome of a science experiment will be.  This can be followed up with a topic where students explain if their hypothesis was correct and the steps they completed with the experiment.  They can also do a demonstration of the experiment.
• X Marks the Spot: Students use an online map to show the impact a location has on history.  Flipgrid's screen recorder feature is a great tool within a Social Studies/History classroom.

​Do you have any other ideas you'd like added to this post?  Make sure to include them in the comments below.

If you've never used Flipgrid before or need a refresher on how to create topics, make sure to check out the videos below.