Using Video Demonstrations Effectively in Your Teaching

How I got started with creating video demonstrations

• I was sick so often in my first years of teaching that I dreaded having to use my voice for weeks at a time. When I felt an illness coming on, I started filming my video demonstrations to help my future sick self out. Gradually, I started seeing multiple benefits for this method (below) and I continued making the videos. 

Benefits I see in the classroom

• Cloning yourself - when you're free from delivering instruction, you can offer hands-on help and use the time for materials distribution. This did wonders for my time management and being able to fit everything in that I wanted in one lesson.
• Better classroom management - you no longer have to interrupt a lesson to correct the talkers in the back, and you can also use the time to discretely check in with anyone who seems "off" that day.
• Teaching from a centered, focused mindset - without other distractions, your demonstration can have all the right transitions, vocabulary, questioning, and mood that you would hope to always deliver (if it weren't for that fire drill, or the interruptions, or the kids who are acting out...).
• Attention - whether you believe it falls on the side of good or evil, kids today are mentally programmed to focus on screens. I have seen classes of rambunctious kindergarteners chatting, out of their seats, distracted, who suddenly come to focus as the demonstration played on the screen. Perhaps this type of instructional delivery simply works with their mental skill set.
• Absences and remediation - particularly useful at the high school level, video demonstrations offer a way for returning students to catch up from days missed while the teacher attends to the rest of the class. Additionally, those students who benefit from seeing and/or hearing instruction more than once can return to the video to meet their own needs.

Applications for other classrooms

• Teachers of any grade and any subject are often pushed to their limit with time. There never seems to be enough of it in a day to get everything done! Yet we all know how beneficial hands-on learning is. By using video demonstrations, you are essentially inviting another teacher to come into your classroom to help the whole group or small group actively participate in a project while you attend to all of the other things you need to get done.
• Using video demonstrations helps to direct the work of a substitute teacher or volunteer in the classroom. Often explaining an activity to someone else takes more work, so with a video it is already done - they are free to simply help the students follow along and facilitate their work.

To access my videos and other classroom arts integration activities, visit my Teachers Pay Teachers Store!