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Video-Making Tips: What Not To Do

7/6/2020

1 Comment

 
A long, long time ago, I created videos for my students, and even with all the criticism of the Flipped Classroom, it added so much value to my classroom. Here’s what I learned about what not to do. Do not:
  • Think too far ahead. I learned very quickly that making a few videos ahead of time felt disingenuous and created more work in the long run. A couple of my longer videos (see below) could have been much shorter because it turned out that my students already knew about the coordinate plane. Oops. However, because I had already recorded the video, it was still their assignment. Oops again. This fall, I plan to set aside 10 minutes every couple days to make a quick video that addresses some potential pitfalls of their current (or forecasted) troubles.
  • Upload videos without organizing them. When I started, I just put them onto YouTube, then would share a link for the kids to view. Even with Google Classroom, it isn’t organized. I ended up building a website that has the videos categorized for easy access (it isn’t great, but it helped my students: mrstevens.weebly.com). Another teacher I know has all of his videos with Bitly links and they are customized to be really organized.
  • Teach as though you were teaching your class. The first few videos I made were 17, 21, and 22 minutes long. Participation was low and enthusiasm was as well. Based on informal surveys to my students, I learned that 3-5 minute videos worked the best. The shorter, the better.
  • Teach to an imaginary whole room. My teaching style is built on the energy in the room. When I started making videos (after school hours), nobody was in the seats. It felt… empty. At the time, I had a couple students who liked to stay after and help, so I put them to work. They sat right behind the camera and I taught to them as if I was tutoring rather than instructing an entire class. It made life a lot easier for me, and the feedback from students was positive.
  • Assume students will watch the entire video. Even with short videos, my students would skip around. Hey, I even do that when I’m trying to find something. Knowing that they would skip through the explanations and just copy it down helped me prepare my live lessons differently, and I think they were better.
  • Assume students have no opinion. When I started creating videos, it was just plug and chug, head down, get through them. It wasn’t until I started asking my students, about two weeks into it, for their thoughts. It’s weird, right? Having a video version of me teaching a live version of you? At the end of every week, I would ask if the videos were helping, and what I could do to make them better. If you look at my website, which you definitely don’t need to do, you’ll see that I tried different variations. The one my students disliked the most was when I used a screen recording app. They wanted to see the problems worked out by hand. It made sense to me, so I did that for them. 
  • Assume you are the only ones who want to record. Yes, when we were a couple months into the video-making, my students started asking if they could do the next lesson. Being that they were some of my higher-performing students anyways, it made the decision easier. I taught them the content for a couple lessons ahead, then they made the video and we put it onto the site. This was a fun way to hand over ownership as the class got more comfortable with the format.
  • Feel like you need to be perfect. But it’s going on video! Once I gave up on the need to be perfect, my videos became more me. Now, if I royally screwed up, sure, I’d re-record. However, a few mistakes here and there, a dropped marker, a quick erasure, all made the final cut.
  • Feel like the videos are worthless. During this process, I doubted whether the videos had value. That was until I received messages from parents, asking about a certain step in the video. Yes, parents were using the videos to help their kids with the work. Also, before state testing, an assignment for the students was to take a previous topic, go back, watch the video(s) for it, and create a new one based on their new understanding. The videos served as a spiral tool, something I never planned for (but have since)!


I think that’s all for now. Does that help a little? Is it too much? Truth be told, I’ll be figuring this whole thing out all over again in the fall, so there’s a good chance I’m missing something—or a lot of things. 

Where is your head at with the video-making process?

Happy "You're Gonna Do Just Fine" Fishing
1 Comment
Julie Wright link
8/9/2020 07:53:19 pm

Just wanted to drop you a note saying how helpful this post is. My one small tip is that for at least one video, I found that writing out my work while explaining it, and doing all that efficiently, was too much for my brain, so I filmed myself doing the work on a whiteboard, then played back that movie (muted) at slightly quicker than normal speed while narrating what was happening and getting all that with Loom (screen recording). That also improved my handwriting because I could write slowly and then just speed it back up on replay. :-)

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