This week we learned how video can be used in classrooms to enhance student learning. Growing up I was very familiar with iMovie and YouTube, even within educational contexts. YouTube made regular appearances as teachers used channels like ASAP Science, Crash Course and Bill Nye to introduce units. One summer I took on the mission of completing Bio 30 in one month and the Crash Course Physiology Playlist was the reason I thrived in that course. By the end of that summer nearly had every video memorized. I understand intimately how useful videos can be for introducing, teaching and reviewing.

I hadn’t, however, considered making videos myself as part of my teaching practice. In school, we would occasionally be tasked with making iMovie presentations (a task which I enjoyed immensely as I am well versed with iMovie) and would include video projects as part of my teaching practices, but making videos myself… while a very cool idea I had never considered it. There are a lot of advantages: you can make it specially catered to our exact learning goals, it can be reused year after year, it can be sent out for students who aren’t in classrooms and it can be more specialized to the context in which students are living. However, making videos is incredibly time-consuming. Of course, there is no expectation for them to look like Crash Course, but the process of scripting, filming and editing takes a lot of time which realistically teachers don’t have. What I think would be cool is having a video project in which students are the ones to make an educational video for their peers on a topic (I did this once for social studies and I still remember so much about the French Revolution). Then students would have the advantage of learning from videos and also learn how to make videos themselves. Regardless, video creation is super fun and I do intend to try and use it when possible. I certainly will be experimenting with it for my inquiry project.

For our science class, we used a video format to explain reaction times and demonstrate the experiment we would intend for students to do. It was a really good way for me to see just how valuable the video format could be for educating students!