Creating a Video with Educreations

In an attempt to prepare for next year's Waukesha One initiative (and to try "Flipping the Classroom"), I have started to dabble with creating a few short math videos.  The program I tried was "Educreations".  Although this app is not perfect, I was able to successfully create some videos.

With Educreations, I am able to create a voice-over video that can contain images.  The nice thing about Educreations is that a presentation can be made up of multiple slides.  Before I started recording my lesson, I created a template for my slides.  I went through and typed in the definitions and new Geometric theorems related to the material I was teaching.  I then imported some images.  Educreations allowed me to search the web for images.  I was able to find some diagrams related to the theorems I was teaching and I crafted my sample problems around them.  Once I had my template set, I was able to start recording the voice-over.  I pressed the record button and got to work.  I explained each slide and was able to work through each of my sample problems step by step.  One of the downfalls of Educreations is that if you make a mistake with the video voice over, and are a perfectionists, you will need to record the entire segment over again.  Once this process was completed, I was able to post a link to my video through my BlackBoard class website.

Since I am still new to this video-making process, it did take a while to create the video.  To make a three minute video took between a half hour and an hour (including the lesson planning around the images I found online).  Like I said, I am new to this process so I expect I will be able to create videos faster in the future.

Here's a link to one of the first videos that I created.  It's not perfect, but it's a good starting point.

http://www.educreations.com/lesson/view/properties-of-parallelograms/5047554/?s=YLwcxd&ref=app


The student feedback that I received was fairly positive.  Although they weren't sure if they wanted to flip the classroom everyday, they did want to try the experience again.