Curricular supports for educational videos.
An often-missing piece of the educational video puzzle.
One of my biggest complaints about most “educational” video series is the lack of curricular resources that surround them. So in my own work, I’ve tried to correct that as much as possible. The completion of my AP Biology video series is the third time I've worked through a "course's worth" of videos, and each time, I've tried to be increasingly mindful of providing freely-avaialable curricular supports for the videos I've made. In that spirit, here are the supporting materials that I have mede available to help anyone who wants to use my work in their own teaching|learning:
- Scaffold handouts that a viewer can use to capture information while watching a video.
- A collection of FOSS image resources that I used in producing my videos, which might be useful for other actives and materials creation by anyone so-interested.
- For AP Biology specifically:
- A curriculum framework video alignment document that illustrates which videos address which “Essential Knowledge” statements.
- A sample year-long agenda from my class, demonstrating how I, personally, used my videos.
All of which is great, and helps to illustrate how I built my own curriculum around these materials, but I think it’s important to point out that even taken altogether, it’s still not a curriculum. Even when a school buys a product that is marketed as a “curriculum”, it still isn’t really that. The curriculum of a course emerges from the teaching of the course, and the use of those materials. So while the supports that I’ve created for my own videos help to illustrate what an AP Biology curriculum that uses them can look like, the work of building an actual curriculum out of them is left to the teachers and students who might decide to use them.
Which is really the way that it should be, right?
Have you seen any particularly well-developed (free) educational videos with curricular resources? Do you have any ideas for other supports I could make? Leave a comment or drop a line if you want to have a conversation. I do not check social media.
