In this class we focused heavily on the benefits of incorporating educational videos and screen-casting in classrooms.

Educational Videos

I have replied on education videos to support my learning since I was a high school student. Although both of my parents received formal post-secondary education, I was primarily interested in the sciences which my parents had no experience in. This meant that when I did homework at home, I was not able to ask my parents for help and I often ended up using YouTube videos to help me with my homework. The problem with this is that these videos often included extraneous information that my teacher didn’t expect me to know because these videos weren’t assigned by my teachers. I would often end up going down rabbit-holes that, while interesting, were not always relevant to what we were learning in class. I think if more of my teachers had based their lessons around education videos or assigned relevant videos that they knew for a fact would support the information they wanted me to understand, this may have been less of a problem for me.

I think educational videos are extremely helpful as a learning support. The instructors of the Biochemistry and Microbiology (BCMB) labs that were required for my degree consistently made use of videos to teach us procedures ahead of lab times, saving us time and providing visual instructions without requiring the instructor to be present. These could be slowed down or sped up depending on the students needs and were overall a very useful tool used in these labs.

This is a video that was assigned to me during my undergrad. I think it’s a good example of how videos can be used in the sciences to teach important procedure in advance of labs.

Screen casting

I don’t know much about screen casting but I plan to do this as a tutorial because I learned in this discussion that this is a really useful technology to include in the classroom. I think this a technology that can be very useful because it provides opportunities for absent students to catch up on missed content without requiring the teacher to take on extra work. I have also recently been very interested on using the recording features on Powerpoint, which can allow the teacher to turn on captions/subtitles which can also be translated into different languages. I think that these technologies can be used to prioritize UDL and to include diverse learners, including learners with exceptionalities and international students who might not understand English very well.