A few teachers want to do a video quiz show and were looking at ways to try and figure out an easy way to put it together and manage. My colleague had about blubber.tv which takes YouTube videos and lets you organize and kind of edit them and then add some questions. It did not seem like a bad idea and since this quiz was all in good fun and not a serious assessment we decided to look into it.
OK signing up is super simple. You can sign in using your Twitter or Facebook or just make an account linked to your email. Just like any other service it is easy and quick which is what you’re looking for.
Next creating the quizzes seems pretty simple enough. Click the big create button on the homepage and this screen will welcome you and ask for a quiz name.
Simple, clean and man I’m getting revved up now. I mean who doesn’t love YouTube and here I get to make an “educational” game out of some awesome videos.
Now a new screen will pop up asking you to start searching for your videos.
Yep, I’m digging this simplicity and straight forwardness (is that a word) of this website.
OK, now you get to the meat and potatoes of making the quiz which is what everyone’s been waiting for. You get this nice overly explaining the four major components of the workspace.
The far left side you will find your YouTube search results (it only searches YouTube, not Vimeo or anything else). The far right side is the question. You can only do multiple choice questions with four possible answers. The first one you put in is always the correct one. Don’t worry though mi amigos blubbr.tv will randomize the choices so it won’t be so obviously easy for your test takers.
The middle of the workspace is where the video is and below that is the trimming part. The video that you put in the quiz must be trimmed to be between three and twenty seconds long. Any longer or shorter and it will not let you move onto the next question.
So how did my quiz turn out? Check it out below.
https://www.blubbr.tv/game/index.php?game_id=24973&org=3 (I cannot embed video in wordpress.org – click the link to play the quiz)
I don’t want to be too critical of this site because it is certainly not trying to pass itself off as a savior of the educational system. In fact, I wouldn’t expect many teachers to use it for any major assessments in their classes nor would I expect the good people at blubber.tv to try and market it as such. Maybe a PE class but I’m trying to be creative here. This would be assessments at its most basic and uninspired.
As for a fun way to pass some time – yeah you could do far worse than this thing. Would I use it? Hell no . . . at least not right now. It is very buggy. I am running Chrome and making my massive four question quiz took me a good thirty minutes. Why? Was I trying to get the perfect section cropped down? No, it kept crashing on me. If I tried to type my question before the vide loaded – crash. If I tried to edit my question before the video loaded – crash. If the video was taking too long to load – crash. Switching between questions – sometimes crash. I think you get the idea. It is in beta and will probably be there for a while. I am sure that it will only get better, but for now that group of teachers actually passed on this service (with no intervention on my part I might add) and decided on another route.
What do you think?
Summing it all up, would
First off this thing crashes all the time. I am using Chrome and while creating the quiz (4 brain twisting questions by the way) it crashed plenty.
Technology in the Classroom 