Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Helping Students Get The Most Out of Learning Through Video

Lets face it, school could get pretty boring. Sitting daydreaming, doodling and distracted, it wasn't always easy to stay focused and interested! One of my favorite memories of school was when the door would swing wide open, and what was rolled in? You guessed it; the TV and VCR. The DVD may not have been anything as exciting as I hoped, but it was something that grabbed my attention back and got me engaged.

As we enter the digital age, it's even harder for students to stay focused, with the prevalence of smartphones, social media and YouTube, kids these days have their minds on the digital world. This isn't always a bad thing! It's the present and the future. So how about we incorporate this into their learning! Sounds too difficult? It's not.

At Shotclip we believe that educational learning videos are a great resource for students and teachers. For students it is visually stimulating and encourages them to explore learning and topics in class, and engages them in a more visual world.

Teachers are the perfect catalyst for this, as trusted education providers you have the chance to show students how to responsibly look up resources for learning and also create online tutorials to classes, so they can be referenced when doing homework, study or project work.

Simply set up your video camera or smartphone and record the most important aspects of your lesson.
Remember if you break the lessons into shorter 5 minute sessions you will hold the students attention a lot more. Try and add some props or screen grabs to make it visually interesting.

You can even make the class time activities more fun by posting up discussion prompts or clues to future classes on youtube and asking students to find videos on the subject. And by encouraging the to create video replies this further prompts interactivity.

You can easily edit your video and add cool transitions or effects, pictures and text on www.shotclip.com

A great video resource I found was http://www.watchknowlearn.org/ but we always recommend creating your own and tailoring your class!

Happy video making! :)


Siobhán