Some Reflections on Educational Videos

The quest to combine beauty and the didactic

  I don't know who it was who said, ''the didactic is often the enemy of beauty,' and I can't seem to find the quote anywhere. Which, given the ubiquity of quote memes on the interwebs, might seem surprising.

 And yet, there is something to that statement: too often, the didactic seems drab, uninteresting, boring. A story told to teach a lesson more often than not is not worth reading.

 But there are also examples of the opposite: "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank...," begins one of the beautiful passages ever written in English prose, and Darwin most certainly is out to teach us a lesson.

 Beauty and learning are both their own rewards, so learning should be beautiful.

 Obviously, beauty in the teaching/learning process also has a strategic part to play: motivation is the buzzword here. We learn more if we enjoy what we do, and as a teacher creating things both pretty and useful is also more rewarding. 

 The educational video is a great way to achieve this fusion of beauty and usefulness: with a bit of creativity (and, certainly, some technical and methodological know-how) it's actually fairly easy to make engaging materials: videos that are fun to watch, that make you want more of the same. Things of beauty, in a word, but things of beauty that teach. 

 Additionally, we ought not to forget that today's culture is very much an audiovisual one. Young folks today are used to getting their information in an audiovisual format -on demand, in small and tasty bites, accompanied by some background music and in full colour. This, and video games. 

  As teachers, we need to take all this into account. The educational video most certainly cannot replace other, more traditional, forms of teaching, but it can enrich what we do -and thus, enrich our students. 

 And it doesn't stop there, either: we learn more from what we see than from what we read, but nothing teaches us as much as teaching itself. What if we taught our students to teach each other? Having them make educational videos themselves is a splendid way to do this: they can easily correct themselves, we as teachers can accompany them every step of the way, and they'll be learning how to use ICTs at the same time as they develop both their knowledge of the subject at hand and their abilities as communicators.

  And finally, there are the purely pragmatic issues we've grown all-too accustomed to in this year of 2020: for the foreseeable future, we simply can't tell if we'll be able to see our students face-to-face during every class, and those that need to revise some more will have need for explanations we simply don't always time to give them. A video with its associated activities may go a long way under such conditions.

  To conclude, being able to make educational videos is a highly useful skill for a teacher today, and being well-versed in the skills involved in doing so opens up new horizons in methodology -and self-realisation. 

 If you haven't done it yet, give it a go. You just might find it's fun as well. If, like myself, you're a teacher in Extremadura, Spain, you're likely to have the tools at hand -the computers and broadband connection at school, the radio shack (if there isn't one at your school, why don't you start a RadioEdu program?), and so on. A digital whiteboard can easily become a cinema screen, but you already knew that.

  The one issue, sadly, will be the lack of decent connections and hardware in some of your students' homes. At my own school, there are those that have no internet, or no computer, at home. But the school can help -if YOU make it clear that that's what needs to be done.