Video-Supported Education

Although I did­n’t ful­ly under­stand it until recent­ly, I have always been a visu­al learn­er. My notes in class always include lit­tle sketch­es or dia­grams with LOTS of colour. Brain­storm­ing webs, con­cept maps, and thought bub­bles are some of my per­son­al favourite study meth­ods. As a stu­dent with ADHD, pay­ing atten­tion and absorb­ing class mate­r­i­al can come with extreme dif­fi­cul­ty at times. Being able to con­nect abstract con­cepts with visu­als is cru­cial to my abil­i­ty to process and under­stand con­tent. This week, as our class explored dif­fer­ent exam­ples of edu­ca­tion­al videos, I noticed a cou­ple dif­fer­ent reac­tions I had. 

The videos fea­tur­ing a lec­tur­er in front of their white­board, ram­bling on through their les­son were almost painful for me to watch. I found myself mul­ti­ple times real­iz­ing I am not pro­cess­ing any of the con­tent, and hav­ing to reel my atten­tion back in and try to catch up. The mate­r­i­al was dry and life­less; it felt like the words were flow­ing in one ear and RIGHT out the oth­er. Even if the mate­r­i­al was inter­est­ing, the pre­sen­ta­tion dampered the entire video for me.

There were a few videos that man­aged to cap­ture my atten­tion and actu­al­ly hold it through­out the entire clip. The video that stood out the most was a white­board ani­ma­tion. If the lec­ture fea­tured in this video was pre­sent­ed as the last exam­ple, I would have labled it bor­ing in less than a minute. The ani­ma­tion is what made this lec­ture so fas­ci­nat­ing for me; there was doo­dles, colours, and cap­tions to accom­pa­ny the voice-over, there was always some­thing new to look at and I absorbed every sec­ond of it. 

As soon as we watched this video, I knew I want­ed to do some­thing sim­i­lar. I tried my hand at the Screen­cas­ti­fy videos, but I found very lit­tle enjoy­ment in cre­at­ing it and was thor­ough­ly dis­ap­point­ed by the final prod­uct. I decid­ed to try out Video­Scribe, a web­site used for cre­at­ing ani­mat­ed videos sim­i­lar to the white­board video.

I played around on this web­site for awhile, try­ing out dif­fer­ent ani­ma­tion styles and tem­plates. I had a lot of fun doing this, and I real­ly liked the way my video turned out. I cre­at­ed an ani­ma­tion doc­u­ment­ing my progress on my ASL Inquiry Project, illus­trat­ing the steps I have tak­en so far and some of the tech­niques that have been work­ing for me. I had a great expe­ri­ence with this ani­ma­tion tool, the only down­side I can think of is the fee you are required to pay after your free tri­al. While cre­at­ing an ani­ma­tion in your free tri­al, the video will have copy­write logos on it, but the web­site said these can be removed if you pay for the full ser­vice. I would def­i­nite­ly use this again in the future. You can find the video I cre­at­ed below.