After you have created your videos, you have a few options depending on your school's IT policy and your student populations' access to technology:
- Upload the videos to YouTube. This is best if your students have wide access to YouTube either through phones, home or school use. This will prevent you from having to convert the videos or have a place to host them.
- Share the videos through a Google site. Assuming this is your class site, you can add notes and other information to help your students.
- Email the videos or place them on a cd/flash drive. If you wish to do this then I would encourage you to convert them to a smaller file type like an FLV. The software I recommend for doing this is WinFF as it is free and versatile. I will do a more in depth tutorial on WinFF in the next post but for now all you need to know for now is:
- Install and then open WinFF
- Click "Add"
- Click on the "Convert to " drop-down menu and choose "Websites"
- Then on the "device preset" drop-down menu choose "FLV for fullscreen"
- Note the output folder and change it if you would like.
- Click convert
- If your students do not have the option to watch video readily available on their own, you might need to make computers available before/after school or lunch. If there are a lot of students who need this perhaps having it play on the projector at lunch.
In any case depending on how many videos you have for your students and the pace of your curriculum, I would stress how important it is to give your students a couple of days to watch it in case they need accommodations like choices 3 or 4.
Now you have shared your videos with your classroom (and the world)! So what will you do with your extra class time? I would stress how important it is to still have that dialog with your students about the content where you can answer questions and clarification. However, now your students have had a day or so to process the information and they will have more questions and perhaps you can go more in depth than you previously could have.
This is also a wonderful opportunity for you to introduce multiple learning styles into your classroom. With so much to cover this was always a struggle, but now think of all of the projects, labs, debates, plays, hands-on-activities, etc you can go through with the students (they could even make their own creative videos!). So often I never truly understood a concept until I was able to kinesthetically interact with it so I encourage you to be creative in all of the different ways you can cover a concept.
Please don't just continue on with the curriculum or try and cover more. One of the biggest criticisms of American Education is that it is a mile long and an inch deep. Your students need more than a day to develop an interest and understanding of the content. I always keep a chart of Bloom's taxonomy to help me determine how I should plan my lessons so that they increase in their depth of understanding as the week/month progresses.
Most importantly, we are liberated from lectures. While we still need to produce the video, it can be played over and over again and will allow us the freedom to spend more time going in depth with our students.
Did you become a teacher so you could mindlessly talk for hours about the information that could be just as easily obtained from a textbook or website? Or did you do it because of your passion for the content and the magical moments with students, helping them understand and develop interest.
Did you become a teacher so you could mindlessly talk for hours about the information that could be just as easily obtained from a textbook or website? Or did you do it because of your passion for the content and the magical moments with students, helping them understand and develop interest.
You are free to be the teacher you always wanted to be, this is technology properly utilized.
If you have any questions, concerns, suggestions, tips, please leave a comment.
Thanks as always for reading!
