Issue link: http://educator.cta.org/i/1491904
F T E R T E A C H I N G high school math for years, Kareem Farah realized that lecturing in front of his students wasn't working particularly well — he was a bottle- neck, he had come to realize, a talking head who was reaching, at best, a handful of students at any given time. Worse, pacing was a problem that a simple change of speed wouldn't solve: Slow it down and the lecture would bore most of the kids; go too fast and other students would fall behind. Farah, a teacher at a Title I high school in Washington, D.C., also noticed that when his students missed a few classes, it set them up to fall behind for the rest of the year. In response, he began recording his lessons on video to give his students a way to access the material from anywhere. Getting in front of the camera intimidated him at first, but Farah quickly realized that readily available tools made the process fairly painless and didn't require much tech savvy. He created his first instructional videos by using a mic and a screen-casting program — such as Explain Everything — to record his lecture over informative slides. He then uploaded his video to Edpuzzle, which allowed him to embed questions to check for understanding. e strategy was so effective that he taught whole units this way. "Once the lecture bottleneck is removed," Farah says, teach- ers can "rethink many of the other rigid constraints that have defined most instructional delivery models." His students could even watch his lectures at home and proceed to the next lesson once they mastered a concept, allowing them to move at their own pace while freeing him up to roam the classroom and tailor instruction to students' individual needs. In the end, is it worth the time investment? You can keep it simple at first, according to Farah: Start with a key lesson, break it down into segments, and create short videos to ease students into the activity. Meanwhile, a growing body of research suggests that using instructional videos to supplement or replace class lectures is a powerful approach, largely because it allows students to pace their learning, can be chunked into easier-to-comprehend segments, inherently facilitates retrieval and review for students, and leverages visual cues to reinforce the material. Here are six research-backed reasons why you should con- sider recording (at least some of ) your lessons. to Record Important Lessons By Youki Terada 6 Reasons "Start with a key lesson, break it down into segments, and create short videos to ease students into the activity." A Photos this page and next: Deposit 40 cta.org Teaching & Learning