The harsh reality of distance learning is that NOT every child will make it to the live lesson. Unfortunately, this leaves teachers with no other choice but either to record their live video lessons or create separate lessons.
The problem with recording the live lesson is there are other children who may interrupt the flow of the lesson, which may create confusion for the students who didn’t attend the live session. This is especially true for students who may already struggle with reading comprehension or have a learning disability.
Creating your math lesson videos doesn’t have to be labor intensive when you use these three easy steps: film, edit, and upload.
Film
Before you can actually begin to film your lesson, you have to create a script to follow. Creating a script will provide you with a structure and a general idea of what you want to say in the video.
I’ve found that I make a lot of mistakes when I try to film my teaching videos without creating a script for each section of my virtual math lesson plan. The script doesn’t have to be verbatim, but it does need to include:
- Sections in your lesson
- Resources or manipulatives for each section
- Length of time for each part of the lesson
- Lesson objective
Once you have your script and all of the resources and materials for the lesson then you’re ready to record. When you record your lesson, you don’t have to record the whole lesson all at once. You can record each section separately and then connect them with a video editor.
Edit
Editing your video lesson shouldn’t be something that takes forever. Most of the time during my editing process I just connect the video for each section together.
There have been a few times where I’ve had to go back and cut parts of the lesson to shorten the video length of the lesson. When I first began flipping my classroom, I realized that instructional videos should only be eight to ten minutes long. Any longer than that you’ll lose the students’ attention.
You’re probably wondering what software you need to edit your videos. If you didn’t already know all computers come with a video editor. Apple computers and iPads have iMovie and Windows has an open source video editor.
Upload
The last step in creating video is uploading. If you’ve gotten this far this is the easy part. You just have to decide where you want to upload your video. Some teachers upload to YouTube and others may upload to storage for later use.
If you’re using a learning management system like Google Classroom you will need a link to your video in order to put the video into the learning platform.
Uploading your video depends on the device you’re using. For example, I have a Canon G7x Mark III that I use for creating YouTube videos. This camera has a memory card that can be inserted into a computer to upload files and video.
When you’re filming with a mobile device such as a smartphone those videos can be either directly uploaded to the platform or storage such as Dropbox or Google Drive.
Creating videos can be a lot of upfront work but the beauty of video is that once it’s done you can use it for many years.
