10 Reasons Why Videos are Great Educational Tools

I’ve written a lot lately about the benefits of using videos in your classroom. Guest author, Emily Clearly over at mysimpleshow has ten more reasons why videos are a great educational tool for your teaching:

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Videos are in line with the technological times and can be accessed on the Internet at any point, from wherever you are in the world. Education is something that will never go out of style. Why not put the two together?

There are plenty of reasons why videos are great educational tools, and there are many tools on the web to help provide you with video content. You can hire professionals to create videos for you if your budget allows. Video hosting sites like YouTube, Wistia, and Vimeo offer endless options for pre-curated content. Although they are helpful, sometimes these sites can be over-saturated with content. That’s where video creation tools like mysimpleshow come in (see the sample video created below, using mysimpleshow). The tool is great for creating more tailored and personal content, and you end up with a professional quality explainer video in no time, and without budget! It’s simple, and adding videos to lessons really engages the learner.

If you’re not a believer in video and need some convincing, or you’re still slowly hopping on the bandwagon, here are 10 reasons why educators should be using video inside and outside of the classroom.

1. Enhance Skills: Making videos is a step by step process that requires using different skill sets and multiple intelligences throughout the creative process. Linguistic, spatial, and logical-mathematical intelligence types are all put to work while creating videos, enhancing your communication, visualization, and reasoning capabilities.
2. Learn Storytelling: Videos are stories in motion. When teaching or sharing information, using a story to explain the concept helps learners better understand and remember the message. If the story is relevant to the learner or describes something they can relate to, they will be more engaged with the information. Remembering pure statistics or facts becomes much easier when storytelling is involved. This is because stories create images in your mind, making the information more memorable.
3. Be Aesthetic: Text alone has an impact, but it is certainly not as effective as it is when combined with visuals. The brain processes images 60,000 times faster than it can decode solely text – so the brain’s learning capacity increases using visuals, thus helping keep messages in mind.
4. Nurture Attention Spans: Over the decades, our attention spans have decreased due to increased exposure to websites, smartphones, and apps. Now, our attention spans last around 8 seconds before we decide if we should stay focused or pay attention to something else. Therefore, shorter videos, around 2 minutes or less, cater to attention span deficiency by simplifying the message to be communicated. That’s good news for you – a shorter video takes less time to make!
5. Embrace Technology in the Classroom: According to 78% of teachers, technology has a positive impact on students, and emerging technology helps classrooms keep up with the digital age. Learning is individualized because students can start and stop videos to understand a concept and create videos at their own pace. They can become self-sufficient learners, and their motivation and engagement levels increase.

6. Spice up PowerPoints: Using video is a great way to enhance any PowerPoint presentation and increase audience engagement. A PowerPoint full of text coupled with a lecture can lead to distraction, but adding a video makes presentations more interesting and exciting. Adding media also contributes to adding variety to lesson plans, catering to various learning styles and nurturing our attention span.
7. Introduce Creativity in the Classroom: Creativity is the key to innovation, and is now a characteristic and skill that many employers consider one of the most important. Why not embrace creativity early on, in the classroom? Creating videos in the classroom or as a homework assignment allows students to challenge their creative side through writing a script and selecting visuals to represent their text.
8. Easily Flip Classrooms: Classrooms are moving from traditional to multi-modal, and from long, unidirectional lectures to engaging discussions about subject material, current events, media, and the like. Using video makes flipping a classroom much easier, as video lessons can be assigned to be done at home. Discussions about the video or having students create their own videos based on what they learned is a great way to adapt this teaching method.
9. Cater to Learning Styles: There are multiple ways people learn according to the VARK model, and using video as an educational tool helps cater to various different learning styles, including visual, auditory, and reading & writing.
10. Pedagogical Benefits: Video creation includes several pedagogical perks. Students learn to communicate more effectively when script writing, collaborating with other students to create videos, or when discussing a video after watching it. Organizational skills, research skills, and the ability to solve problems rationally and creatively are just some of the skill sets used and improved upon while creating videos.

Are you convinced yet that video is basically the best thing since sliced bread? Using video as an educational tool as content in your lesson plans or assigning video creation as homework is the simplest, creative, and most effective way to spruce up your classrooms!

Emily Cleary is a writer and content marketer with a background in teaching higher education, writing, tutoring, and marketing. Emily is a digital native who writes various types of content online about software and technology, business, education and learning. You can contact her via LinkedIn.

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-12 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.