How to Get Your Students to Watch Your Instructional Videos

So I saw this meme come through on Facebook and found myself shouting loudly, “YES!”

One of the most frustrating problems I experienced with distance learning was that some students were trying to simply do the assignment before doing any of the activities leading up to it. Predictably, this led to them often failing the assessment.

For me, a typical distance learning lesson began with a short video explaining the day’s math topic. I would share this in Google Classroom along with other activities to complete. If you made any videos like these, then you know that they can be incredibly time-consuming to make, especially if your are a perfectionist like me and you make a flub up somewhere and have to redo it. Making them short is also very challenging unless you speak really fast, and if you do that then, you probably make more mistakes. Sigh. I get it.

While students watched the lesson video, they were supposed to take notes in their Math spirals. Our math spirals were a real life-saver because it had handy spaces for each topic for students to take notes.

Look for this👆 in my TpT store soon.

After the video, students would then complete an assessment or practice activity like a Kahoot game…

or maybe task cards that I had made digital and put in Google forms.

Of course, everything would always be nicely bundled and explained in their Google Classroom.

So after doing all this, this kids should all ace their assignments, right? Uh. Well, no.

Based on data from my Kahoot, Quizizz, Boom Cards, Google Form, or whatever, I could tell that some students just didn’t understand the skill. After a little google meet time with these students, I discovered to my disappointment that most of these students just had never watched the lesson video… at all. They hadn’t taken any notes in their math spiral… at all. I’ll be honest, with all the work I had put in to prepare and organize these assignments, I was pretty mad at them.

But, rather than simply get mad at or punish at these students somehow, I decided to make some changes myself, and I think that, all in all, these changes made a big impact. Here are my 10 tips for getting the most out of your distance learning videos.

This is a tough one, but it is really essential. I worked really hard to keep all of the videos for my 4th graders under 15 minutes. Younger kids would probably need even shorter time limits. If you don’t, your students will start to tune out and will be a lot less likely to watch your future lesson videos. I ended up breaking down many lessons that I would normally teach in one lesson into two. This helped keep the students’ focus on the topic. You might even consider teaching your students this web video hack. Did you know you can change the video speed?

Just make sure they don’t set it faster than x1.25 otherwise you start sounding like Mickey Mouse!

This was a trick my teaching partner and I figured out around the same time. If you hide an image or a code word somewhere in the middle of your video, then you can use this as a required “key” to get into your assessment. For example, I would add a question like what fruit did I draw during the video or what was the secret word on the fifth slide. We used the response validation feature in google forms to require the correct answer. See below:

Even before the pandemic, the expectation in my math classroom expectation was that we complete work to 100% accuracy on practice activities. Simply put, an assignment is not done until every question has been corrected. Since my students know this, they also learn quickly that it doesn’t benefit them to rush through an assignment. If they do it in a rushed way, they will then need to correct their answers again and again until they are 100%. See my previous blog post on this topic for more info.

In the distance learning environment I did not change this expectation. I always kept google forms open to be edited so students could redo until all questions were correct. If possible, I also used the response validation shown above to require answers to be correct before moving on to new questions or even submitting the form.

Like Mary Poppins suggested, sometimes its important follow something not so pleasant with something to look forward to. In my daily lessons, we would always do something fun (and social) at the end of the day’s lesson. My student’s most favorite activity was to play Kahoot. We did them live, and we also did them as an independent, self-paced “Challenge”, a great new feature Kahoot added last year.

Keep students as physically involved and interacting with as you can. I have students taking guided notes right along with me just like they would do at school. That is much better than having them simply watch me do math problems.

You can also try to incorporate a physical task in the middle of a long video. For example, you might ask the students to do jumping jacks while they skip count by 8’s to 96 or something like that just to keep them active.

My kids know I love jokes – the cornier and dad jokier, the better. They love them, too, even the groaners. Sometimes in my lessons, I just throw a few of those in to keep things light.

I also try to be upbeat and perky in my videos like I would if I were in class. I’ll be honest though, if I’m on my third attempted recording of a video, that can be a big challenge!

When students watched the videos and did well on the assignment, I would link to these ridiculous dance videos using the Sway app. The kids loved it.

I have told some of my teacher friends that during the school closure I felt like I was spending 90% of my time on the 10% who weren’t doing what they were expected to do. As a result, I felt like I was sometimes neglecting the “good” kids who were working hard and following directions each day. As a result, I wanted to reward these students with something special periodically.

While breakout experiences are often incredibly time consuming to put together, they were worth it because students gave me feedback that they had so much fun doing them. On the other hand, the other students who did not meet expectations, still did math practice that day, just in a less fun way. (cue sad trombone sound) They were definitely bummed that they missed out and hopefully learned an important life lesson somewhere in there. My 10%’ers also knew that if they finished with their missing work, then they were allowed to join us in the breakout game so it gave them motivation to get’r done.

With my background in video editing, I go a little overboard with these sometimes. How I set these games up is a topic for other blog post probably, but in short, I embed google forms and other fun things within a google site. Here’s a short snippet video of how the breakout activity begins.

If you have students who are still not working to expectations, then what I did was I had a daily one-on-one google chat with me. During this time I would review that day’s expectations and check their work in their math spiral to be sure that they had watched the video. If needed I would work through the assignment with the student as well. Usually after a week or so of these meetings, I could tell the students that they are expected to continue to do these thing on their own without me checking in.

The way that you record your video can make a big difference in how easy it is for your students to follow. Now I know as a teacher you aren’t expected to be Ken Burns or anything, and your time is limted, but there are some simple things for you to consider that can make an improvement in the quality of your videos.

SOUND. You can record with even an inexpensive usb microphone and make a dramatic improvement in the sound quality of your video. Do you have trouble with background noise? (your kids yelling, running water in the sink, etc…) Try using Airpods if you have them to record. I have found they do a good job blocking out other noises. You can also try “accidentally” locking your kids in the basement. Just kidding. 😉

VIDEO: I love the recording feature in Apple Keynote (Powerpoint has this, too I believe). You can make really neat transitions and really plan out what you want to say and present. There are also options to add great images or even put videos inside your video. (That gets a little Inception, doesn’t it)

Screencastify is also super easy to make videos and exports directly to drive. Super convenient.

My latest hack is to use this super combo: Ipad + Apple Pencil + Notability app. Check out the video below to learn more about this.

With all of these tips in mind, understand that even the best, most well-polished video lesson can cannot hold a candle to a live teacher. A live teacher can speed up or slow down in response to the students. A live teacher can be asked questions and clarify answers. A live teacher can bring students back in to focus or recognize when they need a movement break. A live teacher is not affected by poor internet connectivity, noisy siblings, and cranky parents. A live teacher doesn’t need to compete with all of the temptations at home – snacks, video games, Tik Tok.

On the other hand, a video has the option of being used anywhere at any time. This is handy for when students are completing homework or if parents/tutors need a reference to help a child. So video has its place, as long as we remember it is in the back seat.

~Shane

Thanks for reading. If you are interested in the math spiral pages or videos lesson mentioned in this post, to go with them shown here, please check out these products in my TpT store:

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