week 8: summary of Everything You Need to Know About Building a Great Screencast Video

 This article describes a Washington DC teacher who transformed his traditional mathematics classroom. He created a self-paced learning environment where students proceed through each lesson with an instructional video the teacher recorded and then show their mastery with an exit ticket. This method allowed him to spend more time in small groups with students who are struggling and reframed the traditional practice of moving on with material regardless or not if the student has mastered it. 

He shared that video length is crucial to consider as any video longer than 9 minutes drastically decreases student engagement. He also suggested embedding formative assessment questions throughout the video to help keep students engaged by using a platform like edpuzzle. He emphasized the importance of minimizing text and that whenever the teacher is saying something, change should be occurring on the screen. He iterated the importance of planning the video ahead of time and shared research that shows that students are more engaged when it is their own teacher delivering content. Finally, he described different resources such as Screencast-O-Matic and Explain Everything. 

I’ve read in-depth about a teacher using a similar learning model before. It has always piqued my interest as I think that there needs to be something to help math class seem less scary. I know in my district next year the plan is to teach 3 math lessons a week instead of 5, to help provide more opportunities for mastery with the very real gaps created by the pandemic. A self-paced method might support the plan to cover fewer lessons and allow more time for practice. I want to explore and consider if a model like the one described in this article would be doable in my classroom.