Instructional Video

Assignment name: Instructional video

Uses in the Classroom:  Instructional videos can be used to differentiate your lessons or for flipped classrooms. For differentiation, students can watch the videos before and after class, and stop the videos whenever they need to. Thus, the lesson goes at the pace of students allowing them as much processing time as necessary to practice the skills and to ask questions that may be critical to their understanding. Instructional videos also provide opportunities to include visuals in their lessons and cater for different modalities of learning. In this video, I have used different colors to signify different steps, a practice that is more practical with videos than in actual classrooms. For flipped or blended classrooms, students can watch videos and practice the skills before class. Then class time is used for application of ideas, and defending the reasoning behind the skills in the videos. Students may later use videos for review, especially in math where most students do not take good notes.

Issues to Consider:  Finding a very quiet place to record the videos either at home or school is a big challenge. Because I needed a white board, my original lesson was created using educreations and can be watched here. But that could only be watched by students who have internet access, and I needed to put it in a format that can be watched without internet. So I captured the original video as a screen cast. As teachers, we must make sure our videos are accessible to as many students as possible. Creating these videos and changing the formats takes a lot of time.

Copyright:  As mentioned, I used educreations and later screencast for my video. The math problems were typed using Microsoft word. I created the videos.