Category: Making Videos

I really flipping hope that this works!

11/30/2018

Someone recently posted something on Facebook or Twitter about branching GoogleForms. You can make a form where the user's experience depends on what they select for a multiple-choice item. It's like those Choose Your Own Adventure books that many of us remember from childhood, and I guess the rest of you are millennials who apparently just eat avocado toast and killed the mayonnaise industry.

Anyway, the point is that I got inspired by that post with a mystery author. [EDIT: I have shortened this post a lot from the original draft because you probably don't really care about why I am focusing on discussion skills.]
Today I assigned a different kind of flipped-video lesson. Students will access a GoogleForm, enter their name, and answer this item:

Depending which item they select, one of 6 pages will display. I have an example below:

Students will actually do this twice, because I want them to work on 2 different skills.

I produced six different video lessons (one for each skills), but they are all 4 minutes or less. My wife crashed a couple dishes at the end of one video, but I decided not to re-record it. Four of them were recorded last Sunday evening, and I did the other 2 very early Monday morning (after shaving sooner than usual!) while wearing the same red shirt. My hair looks less-than-impressive, but whatever.

Let's see if this works out as well as I hoped! Comment below if you want more details about how I made the branched GoogleForm, or something else in this blog post.

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How long does it take to make a flipping video?

9/19/2018

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That was the Bonus Question for Monday's #flipclasschat.
The accurate-but-lame answer is "it depends" but nobody finds that satisfying. Fresh on the heels of my recent blogging about this subject, I tweeted:

That response led to some good-natured ribbing from other tweeps, including:

@lucascconner replied, "...With my astronomy vids, I'm spending an hour planning content and quiz, 10-15 mins videoing, @screencasto makes the edits a breeze, then upload to Google Drive, set up everything on @Schoology, and roll it out to my Ss."

I felt a bit self-conscious afterward. For one thing, the issue I have raised here several times before (STEM flipping vs flipped humanities ... they're not the same but I can't quite figure out why) makes another appearance.

But still, what if anything am I doing wrong? How much of this relates to my ADD? Hey look a squirrel! Is this also just about the fact that I like making videos?

Today I made the next video, to be assigned on Monday so I feel delighted to be several days ahead. I used Powerpoint Mix to produce this one, and that ALWAYS takes more time. About 60 minutes to get the text boxes and transitions just right, and 25-30 minutes to record voice-overs. However, unlike the webcam videos, building from a slideshow gives me modules to reuse and rearrange in later years. In fact, I re-purposed a couple slides from a 2016 video for the first couple minutes of the newest one. Also it gave me an opportunity for some slapstick humor at the timestamp below. Pretty sure the kids will like that part....

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Where the flipping magic happens

9/11/2018

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Today's #flipblogs item is a short follow-up to yesterday's piece about filming my first video of the new school year. Behold, my grand recording studio!:

This video lesson is about the different philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Rousseau. You can see one of my props near the laptop: a stuffed tiger to represent Hobbes. I also used a padlock and a French flag. The folded binder near the lamp contains my Cheat Sheet in chart form. I use the school-supplied Macbook to import from the webcam into iMovie, and later I added a few simple titles and transitions. After a couple false starts, I did the raw filming in just 2 takes.
Producing this video took about one hour from beginning to end. Much better than some of the Powerpoint Mix slideshow-based videos that I have made in the recent past, which take several hours to get it all just right.
Here is the final product, just in case you want to brush up on your knowledge of Enlightenment philosophy: https://www.vimeo.com/289132982

This is not flattering.

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Some flipping help for video production

1/28/2018

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In advance of my guest-hosting gig for Monday's #engsschat on Twitter, this weekend I produced and posted some really short clips to illustrate multiple ways to produce video lessons. I remember that when I got started, the video-production step felt daunting and a bit terrifying.

Let me know in the comments if this is helpful, incomplete, inspiring, offensive, or "other"

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We need another flipping term

7/8/2017

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That being said, it seems there are two kinds of flippers in this world: Those who assign videos, and those who do not. Some very smart people have pushed this point recently, like Robert Talbert in his blog and his book. So did Brian Bennett on his nodes blog (until last year when he seemed to change his mind). I have detected 3 reasons for this not-just-videos stance:

to make flipping more appealing & available in communities with tech access problems
to avoid dependence on ed-tech vulture companies, who I complained about in 2015
to emphasize the importance of classroom experiences/interactions over the production and consumption of video lessons

I've been trying for months to wrap my head around the flipping-without-videos concept. Robert Talbert's January 2017 piece described 5 different options, all of which involve a structured activity for the individual-space (usually homework) task: a game, a podcast, reading a text.... Even though he writes a bold-faced caveat that you can't just assign chapter 3 of the book and call it flipping, I fear this is still a misleading suggestion. ("But we have class discussions about chapter 3 the next day, in the group-learning space! That means I'm a flipper too, right?!" Uh, no I don't think so.) If we stretch the definition of flipped learning too far, then it will break.

I'm not talking about a civil war within the flipped community.* Maybe video-based flippers are a subset of the flipped-learning community; maybe we need our own label like the "in-flip" or "in-class flip" folks (Catlin Tucker has a well-read piece and Martha Ramirez wrote a mighty fine FLN item). Educators in this sub-group could share strategies for making effective videos, connections between those lessons and group-space activities, methods of accountability for the videos, etc. ... without talking at cross-purposes with in-flippers and other non-video-based flipped classrooms.

What would that term be?! I thought of vlipping, but that sounds terrible (David Walsh agrees) and we might have trademark issues with a Columbian company. Or we could try vid-flipping, but I don't love that term either. Wait, maybe that's why no one discussed this idea before: the brand naming seems impossible! HELP!!!

* But if it happens, then I claim the Captain America role ;)

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I really flipping hope that this works!

How long does it take to make a flipping video?

Where the flipping magic happens

Some flipping help for video production

We need another flipping term

Who is this flipping guy?!

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