First Attempts at Making a Video using ExplainEverything

I have this vision of being able to use videos to help my students learn. But first I need to practice and become quicker at this.

I have heard a lot of people recommend ExplainEverything, so I gave it a go. My first attempt is not for public consumption, took my hours and I didn't think it looked very professional. Then I searched for some tutorials. Perhaps I should have done this first. http://www.morriscooke.com/?p=134

I learned that you can upload a presentation and each slide in the presentation will be a different slide in the ExplainEverything movie. So I decided that I would create a presentation and use ExplainEverything to talk over the top. It seemed (and it is) much easier to do this in ExplainEverything than in iMoive.

I wanted to make the film look slightly interesting, so I took inspiration from Jamie Clark: jamieleeclark85.wordpress.com/ The resources he makes always look great and I saw no reason why I couldn't use keynote to create attractive slides and make the short film more interesting to the young people who will use it.

By far the worst thing about making a video is doing the voice over. I strong recommend writing a script and reading through it. Even then I make mistakes and change my mind when reading it. I have found the experience of voicing a video very interesting. I don't find it easy to succinctly describe physics phenomena, so I imagine that I babble on in class. Creating the video means that I need to use as few words as possible and get to the main points. Hopefully this makes it clearer what students need to know.

If you watch the video you will see black stripes down the slide. In future I need to realise that I must make the background presentations with 'wide screen'. Which is a possible selection in Keynote. This should eliminate the issue.

I wish that in the video below I had used more features of ExplainEverything to actually move the hand around. (I think it can do this). But I will continue to play and make more resources. Hopefully it will help to engage my students.

At the moment I plan to only make instructional videos for GCSE, as I will teach Key Stage 3 with a more discovery approach and I don't want them to always be told the answer. Plus I have online textbooks and activities bought from OUP for them. A-level is changing in September 2015, so I am going to leave that for now. I hope to make very short videos for GCSE so that they will be useable in the new specifications even if content is shuffled about within the modules.

I am on holiday at the moment and I am concerned whether I will be able to keep up the creative juices when I get back to school, but as twitter colleagues have suggested, students will be able to make the videos too! I look forward to that.