Planning Your Video Project - A Guide for Students

Earlier today I published Rushton Hurley's blog post about using video to capture your current students' knowledge to be shared with your future students. Rushton included a sample video from a student explaining and illustrating onomatopoeia. While the final video is short, creating a good video requires planning. Over the years I've refined video planning process that I use with students. Lately, I've settled on the template that can be seen here as a Google Doc or as embedded below as a PDF. Feel free to download the PDF to use with your own students.


You will notice that this template has some checkpoints in it. Those checkpoints serve as places for me to give students feedback, make sure they're on track, and to have students give thought to their videos before using the video editing tools. Having a good plan in place ultimately makes completing the final editing of videos a more efficient process for students.

Developing video projects and creating videos will be one of the featured areas at the Practical Ed Tech Chromebook Camp and the Practical Ed Tech BYOD Camp this summer. 

Collecting Students' Insights

This is a guest post from Rushton Hurley. He is the founder of Next Vista for Learning and the author of Making Your School Something Special.

What if once or twice every year your students made short videos that could help everyone in class prepare for their exams? What if these videos became a collection that students in future classes could use to become more comfortable with challenging ideas?

One high school English Language Arts teacher in San Jose, California, did just that by having students enter a video contest with an insight on some topic they'd covered over the year.

The videos cover writing, Hamlet, Frankenstein, poetry, word use, and much more. Here is an example of a video exploring the idea of onomatopoeia:

Demonstrating Onomatopoeia

This is one of over 130 videos her students have created which were posted to their collection at NextVista.org. Find the full set here. If you teach high school English, hopefully it's a collection that will be useful to you and your students, too!

If interested in making this happen with your students, the folks at Next Vista for Learning can help. Contact them here.