Over the years I’ve made greater than 1,000 movies for my YouTube channel and practically as many for college kids in my school rooms. Here are 5 ideas that I’ve discovered alongside the way in which.
Keep it brief and candy.
Two 5 minute movies are higher than one ten minute video. Even although it’s the identical period of time, watching two 5 minute movies looks as if much less of a chore to college students than sitting via one ten minute video. Additionally, by breaking it up into smaller chunks you give your college students the prospect to consider what they’ve watched or full a brief observe exercise earlier than watching the subsequent video lesson.
Include Highlights, Drawings, or Annotations.
Watch any of my screencast movies and also you’ll discover that I’ve my mouse pointer highlighted to make it simpler for viewers to see the place I’m clicking. When I’m creating video classes for laptop science college students I’ll additionally zoom in and spotlight or circle the road of code that I’m modifying.
Occasionally, I like to make use of textual content annotations to remind viewers of what they’re taking a look at. For instance, when making a video about Google Classroom I’ll overlay an annotation that reads “teacher view” or “student view.” Last week I used annotations to appropriate one thing that I misstated at the top of this video about an augmented actuality geography recreation.
When I taught U.S. History I’d use drawing instruments to circle or draw arrows pointing to locations on a map in my video classes.
Turn on, elevate, and have a look at your webcam.
Even if it’s subconsciously, college students need to see your face and know that you just’re there. Turning in your digital camera, even when making a screencast video, can enhance the probabilities that your college students will watch your video and take note of it. Put your digital camera at eye degree or barely larger. Doing this makes it simpler to make eye contact along with your digital camera which makes for a much better viewing expertise than wanting up your nostril. A greater viewing expertise goes to extend the chances of scholars watching your video all through to the top.
Create a Call to Action
This appears easy however lots of people overlook it. Ask college students to do one thing both through the video or instantly after viewing your video. Your name to motion might be within the kind of some a number of alternative questions which are constructed into the video. Another name to motion might be a immediate for college kids to attempt the issue fixing technique you defined in your video. The level is, you don’t need college students to be passive viewers of your video lesson.
Make it accessible.
Thanks to the affect of my pal Dr. Beth Holland, in the previous couple of years I’ve been extra acutely aware of making an attempt to make tutorial supplies as accessible as attainable to all college students. This means ensuring supplies are accessible on quite a lot of gadgets and it means ensuring that my movies are captioned.
Fortunately, if you distribute a video lesson by way of YouTube captioning and resizing are achieved for you. If you employ one thing aside from YouTube, you’ll be able to nonetheless have automated captioning achieved for you in Chrome. Here’s a demo of how I created captions for a video that wasn’t hosted on YouTube.