Saturday, September 15, 2007

How to Make Videos for Education

Back in 1970, I was an A/V tech at Saguaro High School, one of those nerdy types that could tame the movie and filmstrip projectors (if you can remember this technology, then your joints probably ache a bit when you get up in the morning). Somewhere during the intervening decades, educational multimedia moved through videotape and onto DVDs. Now, it's all about video on the web, with sites like TeacherTube and Next Vista, and even YouTube on occasion, helping the educational community create and share multimedia.

The big difference now is that teachers are not just using multimedia, but making it. And it's not just the teachers, but the students who are getting in on the act through individual and group projects. Every technique is being explored - live scenes on camera, screen recording, slide shows, talking heads, whiteboards, writing and drawing on paper - you name it, they're trying it.

A dream of mine is that we at Qlip Media will be able to make a real contribution to education by letting everyone - teachers, students, parents, subject matter experts, publishers, whoever - make multimedia that really teaches. I started out my career intending to be a physics teacher, and I know firsthand how hard it is to get difficult concepts across, even face to face. So the idea of a technology that enables pretty much anyone to teach pretty much anything they know always seemed pretty farfetched to me. But it seems that we just might have found a way.

Of course, we won't know for sure until a bunch of people who aren't me make a bunch of Qlippits that teach what they know. The Qlippits below have been posted on TeacherTube and YouTube - one about the web world, one about the real world. Surely you have something to teach all of us. How about making a Qlippit and sharing it as a comment here, and putting it out there for teachers to share with each other and their students?

Follow these links to some educational Qlippits on TeacherTube

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