Short instructional videos hosted online are a great way to deliver content to your students outside of class time. Appropriately, many tech-savvy practitioners of flipped pedagogy incorporate instructional videos as part of their teaching. On the other hand, some teachers are avoid this alternative means of content delivery because it poses a technological hurdle, is too time-consuming, or the medium doesn’t allow for an obvious transfer of classroom-teaching skills. One of the aims of this session is to dispel these fears.
In the first part of this session, attendees will break into groups and work together to create instructional videos on a music topic of their choice. The goal for each group will be to create a single 5-10 minute video in a couple of hours.
The second part of this session will involve a viewing of these and other videos available online, followed by a discussion and critique of each video. While there are numerous resources available online regarding the best practices for creating screencasts and instructional videos, very few of these discuss anything pertaining specifically to the teaching of music, or music theory in particular. The second main goal of this session will be to, as a group, gain a better understanding of the most effective approaches and techniques for this kind of pedagogy.
Though not a lot of equipment is necessary for creating a good instructional video, the success of this session will be somewhat dependent upon a few of the attendees bringing laptops to the conference. Other equipment, such as video cameras, microphones, etc. is not necessary, but it couldn’t hurt. I will bring my laptop, iPad, iPhone, and USB microphone with me to the conference. If you’re interested in this session and want to bring some equipment along, please feel free to post in the comments to let everyone know what you have.
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