Edpuzzle for Teachers — Twenty Free Activities, Unpublished Prices, and How to Lay Out a Flipped Lesson

Recess on a Tuesday, and a Secondary 2 science teacher is reading last night's video assignment on her phone in the staff room. Twenty-nine of thirty-two finished it. Eleven chose the same wrong option at the two-minute mark. She turns the screen towards the colleague at the next desk and says, "Third period today, I'm not replaying anything. We start on that question."

What makes Edpuzzle worth the trouble is not that it turns a YouTube clip into homework. It is that the unanswerable question of whether anyone actually watched becomes a named list in your hand the night before the lesson. It is free for teachers, and the edge of that free tier is stated plainly: twenty activities.

The list you hold before the lesson

The mechanics are simple. Pick a video by searching YouTube inside Edpuzzle, uploading your own, or screen recording. Trim it. Drop multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions or spoken notes onto the timeline. Assign it to a class. Playback halts at each checkpoint until the student answers, and the system logs every response, the viewing progress and the number of rewatches.

That last item is what changes preparation. You do not get a completion percentage; you get which question, which students, how many rewinds. With that list, the next morning does not have to open with the question that never yields anything useful.

The audience is unambiguous: K-12 subject teachers. The company states the product is 100% free for teachers and students and that it intends never to charge an individual teacher, with revenue coming from school and district licences. Concept-explanation subjects benefit most, which in Hong Kong means junior secondary science, mathematics, geography, history and English listening. Upper primary works once accounts and consent are settled. Senior secondary classrooms more often need open discussion, so video checkpoints earn less there.

A few features are worth knowing before you start. The Question Generator reads the video and embeds multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions or both, each editable or discardable. Autograde compares student answers against an ideal answer you write and suggests correct or incorrect. Uploading a document or slide deck produces a standalone quiz. Supported Assignments is an umbrella covering Learning Insights class analysis, one-click follow-up quizzes or short readings, cheating detection, and blocked copy and paste. Pro School customers also get Edpuzzle Originals content packs and Edpuzzle Professional, an add-on where a panel head builds and assigns internal PD courses and the system issues completion certificates.

Laying out one lesson

Take Secondary 2 science and a unit on the reflection of light. You want the concept video cleared before the lesson so the period itself goes to mirrors and protractors.

Create the class, import the roster or link Google Classroom, and issue the consent circular before anything is assigned. Choose a clip under six minutes with clear English and more diagrams than text, because students are decoding a language and a concept simultaneously. Open the editor and cut the intro and the tangents: six minutes trimmed to four moves the completion rate visibly.

Rhythm for the checkpoints

Auto-generated questions share one flaw — they bunch in the back half. Redistribute them yourself. The rules I work to:

1. At forty seconds, an unmarked note stating the two things this lesson needs and what to watch for.
2. After that, one checkpoint every sixty to ninety seconds. Three or four across a four-minute clip is plenty.
3. Every multiple-choice item carries one distractor drawn from a mistake you have actually marked, such as the belief that a mirror reverses top and bottom. The hit rate on that option is evidence of what tomorrow must cover.
4. Open-ended answers capped at one or two sentences. Autograde handles long prose poorly, and neither will you review thirty of them.
5. The last checkpoint points forward: what to bring, what prediction to write down first.

What to fix after auto-generation

Two official limits matter. The Question Generator only runs on videos that have no questions yet, so generate first and add your own afterwards; reverse that order and the option is gone. And when Edpuzzle lacks enough information about a video, the option never appears at all.

After generating, check two things per question: whether the answer is genuinely correct, and whether the wording matches the terminology your department uses. The same applies to Autograde's ideal answers — it produces a suggestion, and the final call stays with you.

One toggle deserves thought at assignment time. Teach with Support cannot be reversed once assigned and consumes one Supported Assignments allowance. For a lesson where you truly need to see who stalled, spend it. For a routine weekly exercise, do not.

The arithmetic of twenty activities

The free Basic plan has exactly one constraint: twenty stored activities. Assignments are unlimited, so a single activity goes to any number of classes any number of times, and folders are unlimited too. Every colleague who signs up and verifies through your referral raises both limits by three.

Do the sum. One new activity a week gives fourteen to sixteen in a term, which fits inside twenty. The trouble starts in year two. Two or three years of accumulation will hit the wall, and the options then are to delete, to earn referrals three at a time, to get the school onto Pro School, or to fund Pro Teacher personally.

What deserves a slot

Since the cap counts storage rather than distribution, the slots belong to anything reusable every year: concept explanations, pre-practical safety and procedure, the unit you teach every autumn. Current-affairs clips and one-off catch-up videos should be deleted after use. Treat the twenty slots as a small departmental library rather than a scratch folder for this term.

The real price of the free tier is not the number twenty. It is that every teacher ends up curating a private library that never stays with the school.

Where the money comes from

The pricing deserves an honest note. The help centre does not state the Pro Teacher figure and the pricing page renders through JavaScript, so no citable official number was available while writing. Third-party trackers report Pro Teacher at roughly US$13.75 per month billed annually, about US$165 a year, or US$15 per month billed monthly, with an add-on raising the Supported Assignments allowance at around US$19.25 per month on annual billing only. None of that could be verified officially, so treat the pricing page or your in-account price as authoritative.

Three hidden costs matter more than the headline figure. Self-funding fragments: when a school does not upgrade, keen teachers pay themselves, and a staff of a hundred accumulates a dozen personal subscriptions with a dozen receipts and a dozen renewal dates, which costs more in administration than in fees. Allowances distort behaviour: because Supported Assignments are finite and irreversible, teachers hoard them, so the most valuable feature gets used least. And consent is not free even though seats are: Edpuzzle charges nothing per student, but every student needs parental consent, and issuing, collecting and filing that never appears on a quotation.

When the free tier fills up, nothing is lost. You simply cannot add more until you delete, earn referrals or upgrade.

Consent and language

Consent comes before the first class is created. Edpuzzle states that teachers or institutions must obtain the necessary parental or eligible student consent before student personal data is shared, handling the United States through COPPA school consent and the FERPA school official exemption, and Europe at 16 with member states able to lower that to no less than 13. Hong Kong schools issue the circular, collect the replies and keep the records under their own personal data policy. There is no shortcut, and it is not a decision for one subject teacher.

Language is the second wall. The listed interface languages include English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Indonesian, Italian and Japanese, with no Traditional Chinese. Of the fifteen generated caption languages, Chinese Simplified is available while Traditional Chinese and Cantonese are not, and even that is restricted to the Advanced and Elite school plans. For Chinese, General Studies and Cantonese oral work this is a hard limit; for English-medium junior science it barely registers.

One more question to raise in writing: Edpuzzle does not publish which AI model powers question generation and Autograde. If your procurement or IT policy requires vendors to disclose models and data processing locations, ask directly.

What it does not catch

The boundary is clear, and what sits beyond it is exactly what a school struggles to build alone.

A student who answers wrongly has nobody to ask, only a red multiple-choice option. Catching that moment takes a scaffolded AI tutor that offers hints instead of answers. On data, Learning Insights examines one assignment, while a panel head needs a term-long trend for 2A set beside tests, homework and AI interactions. On curriculum, the system does not know your scheme of work, so video selection and alignment are judged from scratch each time; load the scheme and learning objectives into a school knowledge base and pre-lesson summaries can align to the unit automatically. On money, self-funded teacher subscriptions mixed with a school quote are hard to present as one coherent proposal in an EDB funding report, where each school may claim up to HK$500,000 before 31 August 2028.

Credit where it is owed: on in-video questioning, Edpuzzle beats most integrated platforms, and the checkpoint editor, skip prevention and per-question reporting are years of refinement. The sensible arrangement is rarely either-or. Use Edpuzzle to collect the pre-lesson list, and a school platform for everything that happens after it.

Common misreadings

• The claim: the free tier is a trial, so payment is only a matter of time. What actually happens: the cap is on storage, not on assignments or student numbers. A teacher covering one or two year groups who prunes regularly can stay free indefinitely. What usually drives a school to upgrade is centralised management and Supported Assignments, not the twenty slots.
• The claim: auto-generation saves you the time of writing questions. What actually happens: it saves you the blank page. Reviewing each question still takes five to eight minutes for a four-minute clip. The net gain is real, but do not schedule it as free.
• The claim: more checkpoints produce better pre-lesson data. What actually happens: a question every thirty seconds turns the video into a quiz show, students start clicking to get through, and the data comes back dirtier. Three good questions beat eight across a class of thirty-two.

Three things to try on Monday

1. List the video topics you would genuinely reuse next year and count them. If the total exceeds twenty, decide now which ones stay out of Edpuzzle.
2. Take one clip of four to six minutes and place exactly three checkpoints, with at least one distractor written from a mistake you have actually marked.
3. The night before the lesson, read only two numbers — the completion rate and the most-missed question — and open the lesson with that question instead of a replay.