My High 5 Ideas for Creating Educational Movies | Mono Tech

Over time, I’ve revamped 1,000 movies for my YouTube channel and nearly as many for the scholars in my lecture rooms. Listed here are 5 suggestions I’ve found alongside the best way.

Preserve it brief and candy.
Two five-minute movies are higher than one ten-minute video. Though it is the identical period of time, watching two five-minute movies appears easier for college students than sitting down to observe a ten-minute video. Plus, by breaking it down into smaller components, you give your college students an opportunity to consider what they’ve seen or full a brief apply exercise earlier than watching the subsequent video lesson.

Embrace highlights, drawings, or annotations.

Watch any of my screencast movies and you will discover that I’ve the mouse pointer highlighted to make it simpler for viewers to see the place I am clicking. Once I’m creating video classes for pc science college students, I additionally zoom in and spotlight or circle the road of code I am enhancing.

Once in a while, I like to make use of textual content annotations to remind viewers of what they’re seeing. For instance, once I make a video about Google Classroom, I will overlay an annotation that claims “instructor view” or “pupil view.” Final week I used annotations to appropriate one thing I mentioned incorrect on the finish of this video about an augmented actuality geography recreation.

Once I taught US historical past, I used drawing instruments to make circles or draw arrows that pointed to locations on a map in my video classes.

Activate, increase and watch your webcam.
Even when it is subconsciously, college students need to see your face and know you are there. Turning in your digicam, even when making a video screencast, can enhance the possibilities that your college students will see your video and take note of it. Put your digicam at eye stage or a bit of increased. Doing this makes it simpler to make eye contact with the digicam, which makes for a a lot better viewing expertise than wanting by way of your nostril. A greater viewing expertise will improve the possibilities that college students will see your video by way of to the top.

Create a name to motion

This appears easy, however many individuals overlook it. Ask college students to do one thing throughout the video or instantly after watching it. Your name to motion may very well be within the type of some a number of alternative questions embedded within the video. One other name to motion may very well be a immediate for college students to attempt the problem-solving technique you defined in your video. The purpose is that you do not need college students to be passive spectators of your video lesson.

Make it accessible.
Because of the affect of my good friend Dr. Beth Holland, in recent times I’ve been extra aware of making an attempt to make educating supplies as accessible as attainable to all college students. This implies ensuring the supplies are accessible on a wide range of units and it means ensuring my movies have subtitles.

Thankfully, if you distribute a video lesson by way of YouTube, the subtitles and resizing are executed for you. If you happen to use one thing apart from YouTube, you may nonetheless get computerized subtitles to work in Chrome. This is a demo of how I created subtitles for a video that wasn’t hosted on YouTube.