I’m almost done reading a physical copy of Karen Costa’s 99 “Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos”… I had promised myself I would finish this book during 2020, but that didn’t happen. I’ve been trying to read a couple of tips ever week and have really enjoyed the book. Costa offers simple suggestions and encouragement to create videos that are not hyper produced and focus on connecting with students. The message resonated with me… even after a semester of using Camtasia and royalty-free music to create intros and outros. While I enjoyed making different intros and editing short videos, I spent a lot of time doing this when I could have been providing more feedback or improving content! Costa suggests using simple, human, and short videos created with the video recorder from the Learning Management System (LMS) or using Screencast-o-matic (or something similar). I enjoyed recording video announcements and will (try!) not think twice about the “production quality” of these short communications! I have also loved the videos Costa provides on YouTube as part of the book. As I was reading tip 91 and watching another video, I noticed Karen Costa had a recent video about breakout rooms. I watched it and love the message and the video itself. It is worth watching and thinking about our learning objectives and classroom/workshop sense of community before putting people in breakout rooms. Maybe… instead of breakout rooms we can pause and let participants take notes using a template? Maybe I should think about prompts to use the chat and other tools more effectively!
