Videos in Education
Making and utilizing videos is an effective way to engage students. Often, when teaching students how to add videos into something like Google Slides, I’ll have students ask me if they can add one from their own YouTube channel. Or, when I’m trying to learn something new in Minecraft to utilize in the classroom, students will recommend a video that they’ve watched to gain an understanding of something similar. I even received a message from a student I previously taught in fourth grade about how she and some other students had wanted to recreate a video we made that year. She’s now in high school! That shows just how much the creation of that video had stuck with those students. Video can definitely be such a powerful tool!
Videos in My Classroom
Since I began having students create videos about 7 years ago, I’ve used a variety of recording tools, software and hosting sites. It’s definitely been quite the learning experience to determine what works best to record during class in a feasible way. I’ve recorded using phones, iPads, cameras, camcorders, webcams, document cameras and screencasting tools. I’ve incorporated green screens into my videos by using fabric and even having the opportunity to paint the wall in a classroom. I’ve always just tried to determine what the best tool would be for the video that I’m using.
I started creating videos mostly as a way to have students demonstrate their learning of a particular topic, where I could then post it to our class blog to allow them to go back and re-watch the video to review. The majority of videos that we’ve recorded have been math related but I’ve tried to find different ways to incorporate other subject material as well. Although some of the videos are more involved as far as the editing process behind them, the majority of this page will show you how to create videos based upon tools that you already have at your disposal using easy to use apps or websites!
The Avery Bunch
The Avery Bunch was actually one of our earliest videos. I wanted to try to find an interesting way to have students remember some of the terminology related to fractions. Looking back at this now, I would’ve changed up the wording some but it still managed to get the main point across!
Elapsed Time Number-Line
This video is one of the ones that started out our Math Movie Network. These videos covered concepts that we were learning in class. Students demonstrated what they knew and were able to share these with not only other students in class but also children from around the world! As of the last time I had checked, this video had over 65,000 views.
The BFG Book Trailer
The BFG was one of my personal favorite stories and I was able to share it with students. We decided to create a book trailer to try to get others excited about a book that we had all loved. Using a green screen and Pinnacle Studio software, we were able to film scenes to try to depict one student as a giant, making him appear much larger than the humans in the video!
End of the Year Cups Video
Not all videos have to be education related either! Sometimes it’s great to just allow students to be creative! Thanks to a great idea from Dawn Shortall (who I believe is attending one of these sessions), we decided to create our own music video to the Cups Song from Pitch Perfect. The lyrics to the song were extremely fitting since we showed it at graduation before students moved on to the middle school. They came up with the ideas for how they would perform the cups part of the video.
