Teaching Effectively With School Videos

School videos have the unique ability to introduce new individuals, resources, experiences and locations into the classroom in such a way that can engage your students like no other medium can. The strength of visuals and audio will appeal to both your learners that rely on these sensory aspects. When you incorporate activities that are hands-on, the use of video will engage your learners that are kinesthetic.

Whether the video is used to expose students to a lesson or concept, reinforce content that has already been learned, or to enhance or extend the content, you can consider video and its use as a process that includes four aspects. When you implement these aspects in this order, you can deliver a better experience for your students and create an environment where they will learn something, too!

Step 1: The Temptation
Teachers often use school videos to merely tempt the student into wanting to learn more. This type of video is generally a short piece that is typically no longer than roughly 15 minutes. It will often represent a new concept in such a way that it makes students asking to learn additional information about the specific topic.

Step 2: The Main Event
When it is used as the primary tool within the lesson, the video offers all or most of the critical information that is needed to be covered to learn a particular objective. Even if the video is long enough and includes enough information to cover the topic, it should not be used without additional activities. You should always incorporate the video into discussions, questioning, hands-on activities or writing activities.

Step 3: The Extras
The video does not always have to be used to tempt students or to cover the entire lesson. It can be used as something a little bonus to enhance the lesson that is delivered in the traditional method. This step allows you to provide a new perspective that is then reinforced with a key concept.

Step 4: The Finish
You can also use a video to complete a lesson. One method for doing this is once you finish reading a book, students might enjoy watching the video of the book and comparing how the video version is either similar or quite different from the book version. This encourages reinforcement of the lesson while also providing an environment where students think beyond the lesson itself.

Video as a Tool
Keep in mind that school videos are designed to be tools to help enhance the lesson, not as a replacement for the lesson. To ensure you accomplish this goal, manipulate the medium by "directing" the experience. Pause the video to discuss what your students have just seen, introduce a new concept in a hands-on exercise or ask questions so students can guess what is going to happen next.

You can also mute the sound to have students apply their own or turn off the picture so your students can use the sound to create their own imagery. Both methods can be effective for creating an environment where students must think beyond the information in the video and apply abstract thinking to determine how the concepts fit into their world. It sounds much more complicated than it is and a little bit of planning can help you to make the most of the use of school videos in your classroom.

The most valuable and affordable resource for enhancing your classroom lessons is still educational videos and educational DVDs. So make sure you're using video the right way and see immediate benefits in your students' engagement, retention and test performance by downloading and watching "The 7 Biggest Mistakes Teachers Make Using Video in the Classroom" right NOW!

The small company, SchoolVideos.com, I work for is committed to creating quality educational videos for classroom instruction. From the earliest script stages, all subject area content, images, and music are intensely reviewed and selected for meeting appropriate grade level, curriculum objectives and standards for our proprietary productions. The videos we distribute are also screened to meet our high standards.

Teachers in the 21st century classroom will be better educators if they understand how to use multi media in their lessons, if they understand the processes that research has shown to be the most effective for improved student performance, and if they know how to find quality video resources that will enhance their lessons.

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