Over the last few years, I have produced over 200 videos. I am convinced that teacher created videos are superior to sourced content for various reasons. Firstly, students know and trust their teacher, so prefer their teacher to teach them. Secondly, sourced videos often need an amount of curating because they are not totally appropriate.
However, recently I had to teach a unit that I was far from an expert in. One of my colleagues (Jeremy LeCornu- www.youtube.com/user/jeremylecornu) is not only an expert in the topic but is also a master flipped educator. His videos on the unit are excellent. So I decided to use Jeremy’s videos. The only problem was that I needed to sell it to my students.
Firstly, I told my class that I am not an expert on this unit, but I have a colleague who is. I reassured them that I would be their teacher in class, but for pre-learning of the content, Mr LeCornu would be their teacher. We watched the first video together as a class and by the end of it, they were very happy to let Mr LeCornu teach them.
I think this hand over was successful because I hand-picked the curated videos, I really talked up how good Mr LeCornu was and we firstly watched a video together.
So it is alright to curate videos and not create your own when there are videos available that teach the content exactly the way that you want it to be taught and you couldn’t teach it better yourself. When videos meet this criteria, I am for the time saved so that I can design more effective learning experiences for my lessons.
I will always be a devotee of producing my own content, but I think that curating videos, instead of creating, does have a place.
