Kareem Farah  0:10  
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode 18 of the Modern Classrooms Project podcast. My name is Kareem Farah, and in today's episode, we are going to be discussing building effective instructional videos. And we have two guests today. The first is Zach Diamond, who you all have heard many times, Zach, how are you doing?

Zach Diamond  0:30  
I am doing great. I'm finally on break. So I'm doing better than ever before this year, I think 

Kareem Farah  0:34  
Love it. Love it. I'm glad you need that rest. It has been quite the year. So I'm excited for you to get some time to recharge. And then we have an awesome special guest. It's kind of weird that I'm calling our special guests because I work with her every single day. But this is the first time she's on the podcast. And many of the listeners probably know who this person is. But Meg McGregor is joining us she is our head of virtual mentorship. And she's just an all star educator when she implemented the model, an incredible asset to the Modern Classrooms Project team and really lead the front of the virtual mentorship program, and frankly, a blended learning guru. So she's here to join us, Meg, can you just introduce yourself, tell us a bit about your background and your kind of connection to this work and how you joined the Modern Classroom Project team?

Meg McGregor  1:19  
Sure. Hey, everyone, I'm really happy to be here today. So I'm a former physics engineering and computer science teacher from New York City. I taught in New York City public schools, and then Washington DC public schools where I met Kareem I was actually implementing the model in part when I was teaching in New York, but I didn't quite have all the tools. And when I came to DC and was working with Kareem, I really started using pacing trackers really started honing my instructional videos. And like with the support of that community, it just like was next level for me and my implementations. That's kind of how I got involved. I joined Modern Classroom staff earlier this year. And I've been running the virtual mentorship program, as Kareem said, so I'm really excited to be here. Because now when some of the listeners, some of the people in our virtual mentorship program asked me like, Hey, are you on the podcast? So I can actually say yes. Because previously, I've had to be like, actually, no, I'm not.

Kareem Farah  2:20  
Well, you finally got the invite. We weren't keeping it from you. It just wasn't the right time, this time, and, uh, no better topic for you to cover is blended learning.

Zach Diamond  2:32  
If we're gonna have a self paced classroom, self paced learning, I think it's sort of necessary to record and then multiply the teacher, you know, on any given day in the class, you could have a kid on lesson one, another kid on listen to another kid on lesson three, four and five, right. And there's just no possible way as the one teacher in a room with 25 kids to deliver five different lessons at the same time. And so for me, the why the purpose of using instructional videos and blended learning is to facilitate the self pacing aspect of the model, which for me is like central that's sort of the main draw for me personally to the model is the self pacing, but it just couldn't work without a recording of the lesson.

Meg McGregor  3:19  
The beauty of instructional videos is you're really building out a library for your whole curriculum that exists forever. So at the end of the school year, your kids preparing for that high stakes exam, actually have your lessons recorded to go back to for review.

Kareem Farah  3:41  
And it speaks to this idea of equity, right? Like when we build an instructional videos, not only do we unleash the capacity to let students work at their own pace, but we also just ensure that kids can access content in an unrestricted way, especially when they had to miss it for reasons that were out of their control. So I think there's a lot of elements here, I think the most important is obviously the facilitation of self paced learning. But even without that there's real power and making sure that these videos are located on digital home base and last in perpetuity, to create equity and help prepare students down the road when they need to review content that's already been covered for seminars and exams and all that good stuff.

Meg McGregor  4:22  
You really want to shoot for six minutes as the ideal I would say for all learners. I know for myself, even I do better with shorter videos than longer videos. But especially if you teach younger kids, you might want to think of six as even too much. I know a lot of our our kindergarten teachers keep it even shorter than that three minutes, four minutes. You want your videos to be highly visual. It's so hard to read and listen at the same time for adults and kids. Right. I know when I'm in a presentation even and I'm looking at a slide that has paragraphs on it. I'm instantly reading the paragraphs And ignoring the person talking to me. So you really want to focus on images, handwriting over, having a lot of text for your students to look at in your instructional video. And then you want to keep your videos moving, you want them to be sequential, you want to use animations, bring things in, as you talk about them, highlight annotate as you talk about those points. And then you want your videos to be interactive, you don't just want your kid to, you know, press play, and then sit back and spaced out, right. There are a lot of tools we can use to keep kids engaged, primarily applications that embed checks for understanding like EdPuzzle, which we'll talk about later, but even something as simple as guided notes.

Zach Diamond  5:47  
In terms of refining their pedagogy, like the reason that six minutes is achievable, is because you're only including one objective, I think those two points, and we're looking at a graphic that I'll put in the show notes that that listeners can look at and see what we're seeing. But the reason that a six minute video is ideal is because it is enough time to cover only one objective. You know, if you're covering more than one objective, you know, the kids mind, construct a cloud up and not be able to follow the logic of things. I always tell my mentees. If, if you're ever saying in the video, now that we know this, we can do this, right. That's the point where you should stop and make the second thing a second video, because it also gives you a chance to do a mastery check like this is all interconnected to me. And I think that the brevity isn't about like concision of language is not about using fewer words or cutting out your arms and ahhs it's really about planning a unit with the lessons that are as refined as possible.

Kareem Farah  6:42  
I think there's a one dimensional understanding sometimes that's pushed out there around instructional video creation. And I think it's easy to just kind of think that the only way to build an instructional video is to create a really fancy slide deck and then screencast over it. I think that's actually the most digestible approach to take. But I remember being shocked walking into your classroom and asking how you build instructional videos. And you're like, I just take a screenshot of these guided notes, and then I annotate them with explain everything.

Zach Diamond  7:11  
What I do, when I plan these, these units that I make is I actually do the project myself. And I think it's actually just in general really important to do exemplars, and do the project yourself. Because some of the things that you wind up doing, like you wind up doing the things that you ask the kids to do, and it's like, not fun, and it's not useful. And you're like, Okay, I can cut this. But what I'll do is I'll screencast myself doing the entire project. And make just made a great point about not just putting a screencast in front of the kids. But what I do with that screencast is I say, Okay, I have this three hour video of me making a song, right? What are the things that I did that the kids have to do? And what are the things that the kids have to do that they have to be taught how to do that I haven't taught them already. And then I'll plan my unit around those skills, right. And I will make an instructional video that basically takes a static screenshot of the part of the project where I was doing that thing. And I'll draw on it, you know, here's the button, you have to press and here's the thing you drag in, and here's where you can find this. And here's how you do these things. And I'll actually edit in some of the screencast of me doing it as well as a model.

Kareem Farah  8:14  
Yeah, and I think you know, what this speaks to is the broad diversity of how you can do this work.

Speaker 4  8:21  
My name is Tacks Feliciano and I'm an implementer of the MCP model. I am a middle school education specialist in San Carlos, California, and I as an as an implementer. I really appreciate the flexibility and personalization that tomorrow allows for students as well as teachers. Having the ability to incorporate technology into the classroom has helped increase student engagement and motivation. I love seeing my students succeed and thrive in a personalized and engaging learning environment. I highly recommend the visual mentorship to everyone who are thinking of implementing this model. It provides you with firsthand experience and how self paced learning works, which allows educators to work on their own at their own pace and tailor their learning to their individual needs and goals.

Meg McGregor  9:08  
There are a million different screen casters out there. I'm just going to talk about two because they're our favorites. But I know a lot of people use green pastures outside of these two so you do you. But I'm going to start with my personal favorite, which is Screencastify Screencastify is a Google Chrome extension. I always tell teachers if you are afraid of this shift into a techy world. This is the screen caster you should use. It is so simple. It's as simple as clicking twice to get it started clicking a stop button to stop it. And then the video just appears in your browser when you're done. It really doesn't get that much easier than that Screencastify also integrates with EdPuzzle which we're going to get to in a minute. So I think this is really like entry level, the easiest way to create instructional videos

Zach Diamond  10:07  
if you're the kind of teacher who is anxious about the idea of making videos at all, and the word screencast is freaking you out, you can open a Zoom meeting with yourself and just record the Zoom meeting. I've had two mentees that thought of this independently. And I was like, What a good idea. You know, it's just something that teachers can get their mind around, it's not hard to conceptualize recording a Zoom meeting, that is a screencast. It doesn't have any editing tools at all, you just wind up with a file, but you know, it works in a pinch.

Meg McGregor  10:35  
Explain Everything is an interactive whiteboard app, as Kareem said. And it is just so powerful. So if you want to be able to write, highlights, insert videos, insert images, insert a video of your face, like all this stuff, and you really want to play around with that explain everything's for you. But explain everything's for you. Also, if you just want to like me, take a screen grab of your guided notes and be able to annotate and highlight like, that's, that's really where explain everything shines. For me, it's just that I'm really able to mimic what I would do under my doc cam.

Kareem Farah  11:20  
It all kind of depends on the different apps available. But for example, I often would screencast over Google Sheets to show kids how to make graphs. And Google Sheets, it was much easier for me to do that on a desktop computer, and just record my desktop and take them to Google Sheets and do all those calculations. It was a little bit more glitchy and challenging to do on an iPad. So that's another element. Zach, I'm sure that also sometimes applies for you, when you're using some of the software's when you're teaching kids how to kind of build beats?

Zach Diamond  11:47  
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think that the what the bigger point here is like the screencast is more valuable, when you are going to have the kids actually do a task on the computer, and you're modeling how you do it. I mean, explain everything revolutionized my teaching, it's I would say it's 80 90% of what's in my video is me annotating on in this lane everything slide. But you know, when I put the screencasts in there, it's because that's what the kids are going to do. You know, we could probably have a whole podcast episode on the value of modeling for kids, you know, modeling is huge. And they'll they'll copy you, they'll do what you do. And so that's when the screencasts become really valuable. Explain everything from me as more like sort of teaching direct instruction. And the screencast is more like modeling.

Kareem Farah  12:28  
Oh, yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. 

Meg McGregor  12:31  
Yeah, I mean, in my teaching career, I only used screencasts, when I was modeling how to code, how to build something in AutoCAD when I was teaching engineering, I rarely, if ever scraped cast it over slides, it just wasn't worth it for my content didn't make sense. Like we've mentioned earlier, you want to be building a library of videos that you're using year after year, knowing how much time you can put into a single video, you certainly don't want to be redoing this every year of your teaching career. So avoid dropping in that this is lesson 1.2 on blah, blah, blah, drop lesson numbers, I would even say don't reference your school in case you move schools don't reference the time of year and I saw someone mentioned COVID In a video the other day, you really want to be able to reuse these. So avoid, avoid, avoid making it specific to a specific time or place.

Zach Diamond  13:34  
This year, I was super happy because this is my second year teaching using the model. And I was like I'm gonna reuse on my videos. And I went and I watched one of the videos from unit one. And in the video I said, Alright, on Google Classroom, click on 1920 Unit One lesson one. And I was like, dang, now I have to remake the whole video just because I had 1920. And now it's 2021.

Kareem Farah  13:53  
Yep. So one common pitfall I see is that folks will forget to add an animations. It's a it's a quick but extremely important step that makes videos exponentially more engaging.

Zach Diamond  14:07  
Yeah, I think if not animations, then invitations, right, because I think the worst thing that you can do is have a static screen, even if it's visual, and there's no text, just a static screen with you talking for more than maybe eight to 10 seconds. It's just I don't know how else to say it. But it's kind of boring. Yeah. Kids disengage they need, they need to see something visually to keep their attention on the screen. And you can say what you're doing. And that will actually increase the engagement by commentating on what they're seeing on the screen. So just movement on the screen. Whether it's animation, like you said Kareem or annotation. I think movement on the screen is it or not having movement is the pitfall.

Kareem Farah  14:49  
Meg, can you talk a little bit about the two key ways we see video enhancements happening at the Modern Classroom Project?

Meg McGregor  14:56  
Sure. So one is embedding checks for under Standing, this is so important for many reasons. One, it gives your students something to do while they're watching. It forces them to think about what you're saying. But also like these replays those checks for understanding that you would be asking students live during direct instruction, and students need these. So you really want to think about those questions you're asking to make sure students are following along with your lesson, and really getting those key points.

Kareem Farah  15:30  
Ultimately, I think easing them in with some easy sort of softball questions, makes them feel a little bit more comfortable. And then reinforcing this idea that the purpose of the question is a check for understanding. It's designed for you to kind of evaluate where you're at in the video and see if you're not understanding something. And it was a great way to prompt kids to actually ask me questions. So if they took a question, or answered a question in the EdPuzzle video that I had created, and then they got it wrong, they would raise their hands. And you know, Mr. Fair, what did I not get here? What did I misunderstand? And that was the power of actually providing multiple choice questions, because it gives them that immediate feedback. So if they get the question wrong, they instantaneously know at that moment what the right answer was, and that can inspire a follow up question. So I really liked that approach. And I think that's powerful.

Meg McGregor  16:20  
I would say don't deviate. From what your normal teaching practices. I know, I kind of mentioned this earlier. But really, if you normally use slide decks, use the slide decks you use, maybe alter them slightly to be more effective, according to the research we mentioned earlier. But don't you know, if you're a doc cam teacher, like me, don't start building slide decks with animations and go crazy, like really just take your own teaching style? And think, how do I adapt this for instructional videos, don't spend time reinventing the wheel.

Zach Diamond  17:01  
You know, if you are listening to this, and you're considering trying out instructional videos, and you feel anxious about the change in the format, remember that you know how to plan and deliver a lecture to a group of 25 children. You know, that's, that's so hard. And if you can do it, well, then making an instructional video is easier, because your computer won't interrupt you, you know, you can deliver the lecture effectively and just record it and so there's nothing that really stands in the way of you rolling this out as a video as long as you can record your lecture. I've been a musician for for my whole life, and I've recorded a lot and I've recorded these videos. And I know that like when the red light is flashing and you're recording, it changes how you how you feel, you know, you can feel a little bit anxious you can feel like this is getting actually recorded. So it's like the real deal now, just relax and record. You're a teacher and you know how to deliver these lectures and it's going to be good and the kids are going to learn from it even if it's not perfect.

Kareem Farah  18:01  
And we will pick this up again next week. Have a good one everyone