Over the last 20 years, I have used plenty of videos to drive engagement in my classroom and I would actually say that it’s my favorite way to encourage engagement. Utilizing videos in the classroom is beneficial to students and teachers alike. For students, they create a better sensory experience than just using paper, provide a resource that can be viewed anywhere, enable media literacy and have been proven to increase retention of content across all areas. For educators, showing videos in class provides an opportunity for students to have an activity as they come into the classroom, offers flexibility, promotes the idea that we can shift from teachers to facilitators and increases engagement (Bevan, n.d.). This past school year in my weight training and conditioning class, I used videos quite a bit in order to demonstrate certain lifting and training techniques. Oftentimes, when students have the opportunity to see how other people masters in their field accomplish tasks and can understand that there are legitimate reasons behind why they need to be working those muscles, they are more likely to push through the exercises. I mean why not use professional athletes to tell the story rather than their old out of shape coach. When I was teaching agriculture, I would use videos in all of my classes, ranging from safety videos in the shop to castration and tail docking videos in my animal and veterinary science classes. I am also a huge fan of having students create videos to exhibit mastery of concepts. Every year in my shop classes, I would assign a group of students to demonstrate the proper way to use a tool and the safety procedures that must be followed with it. Students are required to take a safety test every year, so I would show the videos to the class and then they would take their safety test. This is engaging and fun for students to watch each other, and I usually encourage them to be humorous, yet serious with the display of their safety techniques. I have used the use of video for entry and exit tickets to drive home concepts of learning for the day. I have used them to promote thought provoking discussion questions and ways of formative assessment. The strategic use of video within the classroom both brick and mortar or via a learning management system puts added value in lessons. I am including a short video I made for our CT that used as hook to pull students into the value of goal setting in athletics. After students read the quotes on the video, they will answer a discussion question via a google doc to start a class discussion thread on the importance of goal setting and using it as a pre-assessment on how much they know on setting SMART goals and action steps.
References: Bevan, M. (n.d.). Why videos are important in education. Retrieved July 27, 2020, from https://www.nextthoughtstudios.com/video-production-blog/2017/1/31/why-videos-are-important-in-education
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