Week 4 - Video Lessons

Uses in the Classroom
Instructional videos are extremely useful and will play an important role in the flipped classroom. In this instance, the student can view the lecture like material from anywhere, any time and as many times as they wish while leaving the class time to work through problems with the teacher’s assistance. This has huge implications for students that may be having trouble or wish to review lecture content many times for better understanding or review. No longer do students need to worry about missing a class or a concept, and the teachers can focus on helping students work through assignments and creating high quality content with the class time they have rather then worrying about filling time lecturing to students.

This type of video could also be used as a remedial lesson for students who are having difficulty. I envision this being particularly useful in math class where students might have to listen to a lecture like topic several times in order to understand a concept. Instead of assigning more questions and problems to a student in difficulty – which they may or may not be able to do, certainly causing frustration – the teacher can simply say, “watch this video at home tonight if you’re having trouble doing the homework”.

Issues to Consider

Although this seems like the Holy Grail for getting students to use class time to the benefit of their learning, this type of process puts huge time demands on the teacher. They must invest in not only learning to use the (admiralty simple software) but take time out of the day to produce and record the actual videos themselves. For people with attention to detail or even borderline OCD this can take a seriously long amount of time while they try to produce every little detail of the recording.

I think there’s some value in the flipped classroom and using class time more effectively, but it’s a new idea and one that has to be worked with cautiously. It’s not right for every subject and every student, but I think when used carefully as a follow up tool or a surgical tool to help with a specific concept it can really enhance student learning.

Copyright: All images in this presentation / video were gathered using the open access search feature in Google Image Search. Image of Trench Foot was used with permission from http://www.gwpda.org/photos/ One image of the recruiting poster was used with permission from the Government of Canada Military History Library.