If there's one thing that units students universally, it's video. Young people spend more time on YouTube than watching any cable network in the country. Video is the best way to meet your students where they are.
From incorporating video into your lesson plan to engaging prospective students, here are 7 fun ideas educators can do with video!
Take prospective students and their families on a virtual tour. Use an interactive map that encourages viewers to feel engaged with your physical layout.
You can further orient students to campus life by highlighting fun local traditions and landmarks. A series of shorter videos are great for browsing, and they allow you to use multiple faces and voices – maybe popular campus athletes or faculty – to represent the people at the heart of your campus.
Video is a fun, engaging way to welcome students and show them what you have to offer.
You can include helpful presentations that show them how to find and applying for housing, enroll in courses, and engage with extracurricular groups on campus. Use this time to describe interactive classrooms, top-of-the-line science labs, and the many study spots available to fit each learner’s needs.
The videos will ease their concerns about fitting into campus life and will assist their transition into the next phase of their educational experience.
Videos can help students reflect and prepare before discussions, show complex experiments or equations, and demonstrate intricate procedures.
Video walk-throughs of new concepts and problem-solving approaches provide anytime access to instructors in a format that can be watched as often as needed as students complete homework and work toward mastery.
Not only will students learn the subject matter, they’ll also discover how to present content in visually compelling ways. The process will increase their information literacy skills and add a bit of camera skills and video editing to their repertoire.
Video can be done many ways – complex, full production video, screen capture while solving a problem, or a simple interview recorded with a smartphone.
Let students share tips with each other in short, fun video interviews. You’ll help reorient what can seem like an unmanageably large organization into easily negotiated pieces.
Faculty and staff can also share survival tips for everything from time management to where to do your laundry.
With video, your alums can re-visit a former hangout, stay up with campus transformations, and even sing the fight song with students in the quad before the big game. Encourage your alums with video to take an online class from a favorite professor. Show off the great research your faculty are producing.
Perhaps most importantly, the right video can acquaint alumni with current students, showing them the remarkable recruiting potential and talent base at their own alma mater.
With a series of short videos you can bring the local culture to life by showing landmarks and discussing the history of your town. Fill students in on campus haunts, volunteering opportunities, and the places and people that make your college town unique.
Whether you’re discussing the weather or listing the ten most popular local fashions, these videos will show potential students the wider community they’ll inhabit.