A few weeks back, I shared an example of digital resilience here on the Radical when I learned that Zaption — one of my favorite tools for creating digital tutorials for my students — was going out of business in early September.
To be honest, I was devastated. Zaption tutorials have become the first step that I take in my classroom whenever I want to reteach individual concepts to my students or to provide enrichment for kids who are ready to move on before our lessons even begin. Stated more simply, Zaption tutorials made differentiation doable — and I had invested a ton of time and energy into creating tutorials on dozens of topics connected to my required curriculum. Losing that work was hard to imagine.
That’s when I stumbled across Edpuzzle — a service that makes it possible for users to create the same kinds of digital tutorials. Better yet, Edpuzzle is seamlessly integrated with Google Classroom — making it possible for users to import their class rosters, assign content, and track progress back and forth between the two platforms. For a guy like me working in a Google Apps for Education district, that is an awesome feature that Zaption didn’t offer.
After tinkering with Edpuzzle for just a few minutes, I knew that I’d found a great replacement for Zaption. Creating videos and tracking progress is just as easy in Edpuzzle as it was in Zaption. Edpuzzle users can also ask the same kinds of questions and include the same kinds of content in their digital tutorials as Zaption users. In fact, the final products made possible by Edpuzzle are nearly identical to the final products made possible by Zaption.
The only hitch: I wasn’t all that excited about recreating the 30+ tutorials that I had stored over in Zaption. Ain’t nobody got time for that.
That’s when Edpuzzle saved the day yet again, dropping me a message in Twitter that pointed me to a new feature that they’d just finished developing: One click transitioning from Zaption to Edpuzzle.
Here’s the details:
Do you see how ridiculously valuable that is to Zaption users like me?
Thanks to the work of the folks over at Edpuzzle, losing Zaption isn’t going to hurt me at all. By making it possible to automatically import my Zaption content into their service, Edpuzzle has saved me a ton of time AND made it possible for me to continue providing differentiated learning experiences for the kids in my classroom. That matters.
#grateful
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Related Radical Reads:
Goodbye Zaption. Hello Edpuzzle.
Zaption Makes Differentiation Doable
In Celebration of Teaching Geeks
