Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker is a free online tool that allows you to add your own text, images, social media content, etc. to any existing youtube video. It’s a bit like iMovie or Windows Movie Maker for the web. Plenty of others have written about how it can be used in the classroom (see for example here or here).

In this blog post I’m going to just concentrate on explaining how to create a link to external content, specifically quizzes created with learnclick.com.

First watch the example project using a youtube video containing the song “Perfect” by Alanis Morissette. Embedded into the video are 3 quizzes asking questions concerning the lyrics. The links to the quizzes popup in the middle of the song and automatically pause the video.

If you want to see exactly how I did it, you can just click on the remix button  of the above project.

To create a link, first click on “Events” and then on “Text”.

Add a text, like “click on this link”, to make it obvious that it’s a link and under “Link URL” add the link to the learnclick quiz you previously created. Under the “Advanced” tab you can also add a background color, so that the link stands out more. You will see that it created a new layer with a movable text bar. Move the text containing the link to the place in the video you wish the student to take the quiz. At the same place also add a “Pause” event, so that the video pauses.

That’s all! It does take some time fiddling around with Mozilla’s Popcorn Maker and it’s probably not something you will do often, but why not give it a try?

Learnclick.com is well known among EFL teachers, because they enjoy the ease with which one can create cloze tests. Michelle’s and Tim Julian’s pages are just two examples of some really well done English quizzes. Of course you can use learnclick.com with any language. Here is a page with some Spanish cloze tests. As you can see from the below screenshot (a cloze test in Arabic), you can use any script.

Learnclick.com is also used to create Math quizzes, Social Sciences, Economics, etc.. If use learnclick.com to create exercises for a subject that we haven’t mentioned in this post, please leave a comment below.

Google Forms is a well-known tool among teachers for creating online quizzes. Of course people like it because it’s for free. In order to use it you have to login to https://drive.google.com and then click on “Create” and choose “Form”. If you are a frequent user of Google Docs, you might appreciate the fact that it is part of that suite. The main benefit is that the answers are put into a spreadsheet. Although it’s a useful service, it is quite limited and also not very intuitive.

These are some things that are missing:

• It doesn’t provide the student with any feedback. You cannot use Google Forms to create practice exercises, because it won’t show the student the correct answers.
• You can’t do any formatting of the text.
• You can’t insert images, embed audio or videos.

Learnclick.com might be a worthwhile investment, if you are looking for an inexpensive alternative. Learnclick.com not only allows you to create multiple choice quizzes (including all the above mentioned features Google Forms is missing), but also cloze tests, matching exercises, etc.
Although learnclick.com presents a nice way to display the answers a student provides, you currently can’t export them directly to Excel. Actually you could just copy/paste the generated table and it will automatically convert it into the spreadsheet format. Anyways, if this is a feature you miss, you could request it (Update: Somebody requested this feature and you can now export the data as a coma separated file and easily import the statistics into Excel). We listen to our users and answer all support questions. Please write in the comments if Google Forms provides a feature that you miss on learnclick.com.

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