As a teacher who loved the flipped classroom and made my fair share of mistakes, I agree with the crowd saying to leave your videos raw. It’s what you do in class every day – raw. Having a nifty edit on a video makes you look better to the outside world, but that’s not who the videos are intended for.

Camtasia is where it’s at – I love how easy it is to use!

As long as the videos are less than ~5 minutes, you’re good. Anything more than that and you start to toe a scary line of turning a great tool into a bad practice, unless your kids are completely fine with longer videos.

I think I’d better just take the advice you and the others are recommending. I’m sure those little extra bits make it that much more personal when students realize that it’s a human piecing the videos together. I really like the idea of saying ‘now you calculate this, kids’ rather than putting it all in there. Then the students are finishing our sentences in the video, and that makes it possible for us to see how students are engaging with the material there.

Thanks, Megan!

Love the ideas here Mariam – thank you! Confirms a lot of what I’ve observed in my experience.

This is super helpful Brian – thanks for your comments. I like the term ‘on-demand’ to describe the purpose that some of these videos might serve.

Here’s an example I don’t hate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Tg0nOjfzXU. LOL at 4:28 when you can hear me drop a desk drawer full of stuff to get my calculator while video is rolling.

My advice? Stop the editing. I don’t know that it’s best for the kids. Somehow our videos need to make them think. How can we find ways to encourage them to follow along with us? Maybe we should stop short of calculating solutions and forcing kids to look them up elsewhere.

I post to you-tube and if there is something that needs to be fixed, I will add a comment or block in a corrected title. I like that the students see me thinking about the problem and they like finding a way to do it faster!

I love playing the video in my non-flipped classes and circulating the room, it really improves class behavior, with my back never to the class.

And for my flipped class, I run the video through EdPuzzle, which allows me to embed questions and see what the students understand before class each day.

For everything else – topical videos, extensions, homework help, etc, I did really quick and dirty on-demand recordings. They helped that year, but may not come up again, so they disappeared after a while. It helped me really identify what I needed to teach and what students could explore on their own.

To answer your question about writing the info out first, yes, I know people that do that with high success. They can take the time to write important info, so their handwriting is much better, and they can then focus on the speech second. It’s easy to speed the recording up in post (clip speed in Camtasia) to match the audio. I’d say give it a shot and see how you like it.

Hi Jon,

You’re right about the perfection part – real instruction in front of students isn’t perfect. I wonder if my efforts to try to produce perfect videos is (1) wasted because my instruction isn’t as good as I think it is and (2) dishonest about the messiness of real learning.

Useful insights – thank you!

Hi Andy,

I definitely let perfection be the enemy of the good. With all of the constraints I’ve already placed on myself, that editing part is probably the one that can be relaxed a bit.

Thanks for the advice!