Brent Warner
This is the HigherEdTech podcast, season two episode 13: editing videos and making changes in your classroom.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome to today’s higher ed tech podcast. I’m Tim VanNorman, the instructional technologist here at Irvine Valley College.

Brent Warner
And I am Brent Warner Professor of ESL here at IVC. We both enjoy integrating technology into the classroom, which is what this show is all about.

Tim Van Norman
Welcome, we’re glad you’re here with us. So Brent, anything new.

Brent Warner
I have been really busy. There’s just a lot of outside committee things and trying to figure out all sorts of things for the upcoming year, like, you know, there’s the conversations about what’s going to happen next school year, even in the fall are starting to line in and starting to starting to pour in. So it just gets, you know, people start asking questions, and what’s school gonna look like? And so it’s been keeping my plate pretty full. How about you?

Tim Van Norman
Many of the same, a lot of people are asking, what’s the future going to look like? And you know, my crystal ball is not so crystal. So yeah, it’s, it’s been a lot of the same things going on that have been but it’s, it’s very strange. We’re starting to see more people on campus. So we’ll see what happens with that. The athletes started coming back this week. Oh, so.

Brent Warner
So you’re, you’re peeking out the window and seeing things going on in the background?

Tim Van Norman
Well, not from the angle I am. But yes. All right.

Brent Warner
So today, we’re gonna be talking a little bit about editing videos and making changes. So I think we should just jump into it. Alright, so Tim, you brought up this idea of like talking about editing videos, because it’s just, it’s huge these days, right? Everything I, we actually, today in class, I had a student say like, Hey, you know, are you recording all of this? You know, and now it’s getting to the point where students are expecting, like your recording, and hey, I can go check it out again later. And so that adds to our workloads as teachers and as you as an instructional technologist, like, that’s a lot more work, we used to just be able to close the door and walk out and be done for the day. But now there’s like, what’s the whole process after that? Right?

Tim Van Norman
Right. And is really important, because there’s a couple of different things that come up one before your class, if you, like, many people start the recording automatically when you start a meeting. And then you might have people introducing themselves talking, just chit chatting before class, is that really important in your class, if you’re going to review that later, for recording, in fact, that might not be good. The other part is you do a breakout room, if you forget to pause your recording, that can be 10 minutes, half an hour, whatever it is, you’ve got in a breakout room that’s not recorded at all. And that’s just dead space, right? So that’s useless to the person again, they’re just sitting there watching a blank screen or something like that. That’s not useful. And even more important is confidentiality. How many times after class is a student say, Hey, Mr. Warner, and tell you something, and you’re sitting there going, Oh, no, this is recorded. So you want to edit that out? You want to get rid of some of those things. It’s, that’s why it’s important. Now, if you don’t have any of those problems, men don’t edit. And save yourself the time. Yeah. Well, I

Brent Warner
guess I’m just gonna jump in here. Because I think one of the biggest issues is like, once we kind of get in teaching mode, most teachers haven’t trained themselves to think of their editing in in the moment, right? Like, hey, I want to be editing live, I want to be cutting this out, I want to be pausing it, I want to, you know, like, it’s just, we’ve already got a whole plate in the, you know, the days curriculum plan and all that type of stuff. And it’s like, Wow, so now I have to add this whole extra layer on top of it. I think it just drops out of people’s minds when they’re when they’re running the regular classes, right? It’s just not not part of their regular procedure. And even if it was, it’s like, I I’m pretty good at remembering to pause when we go on break. But that’s about the limit of, you know, on a pause and there we go.

Tim Van Norman
Right. And by the way, I’m the same way when I record something I have now learned to Okay, when I’m typing, I stopped type stop talking and I type the paragraph that I’m going to type and then I start talking again, I go back and I edit it and I speed that up so it may man it looks like I’m really fast and the minute it took me to type that all takes two seconds. But because it’s it’s not about me typing it’s about the content. So those types of things are good. You learn how to do those. But unfortunately, it’s editing, it takes time. And I don’t want to add extra work to you guys. That’s not the purpose for this. But I really, especially when it comes to confidentiality, there’s been a couple of times when I realized, Oh, no, I recorded something. And I’m really glad I did look back at it. Yeah. And somebody said something confidential, or, or something like that. And I don’t want that getting out in any public way.

Brent Warner
Yeah, I mean, there can be cases of private conversations, there can be cases of like, maybe a student comes in and tells you a problem that they have with another student, right? Like, there’s all sorts of things that he, you know, he probably get in trouble for, I’m not sure I’m not going to make any statements on that. But like, it could certainly at the very least, it could be, you know, very hurtful, so definitely something to be careful about. Okay, so let’s talk a little bit about tools, some editing tools, right. I think there’s lots of different things. We all we all know some of them. But let’s let’s run over them.

Tim Van Norman
So there’s a lot of different tools. And part of it, we’re looking at, I while I’m instructional technologist I want simple. My job is not to be editing videos all day long. Okay. And I know you can feel that pain to some days, it feels like it. But but so I look for what is simple. And I know that many schools have Camtasia. It’s a great package, it lets you do all kinds of things. I’m sorry for me, I find it too complicated. I’ve never made Camtasia work right for me even once. So it’s a great package. I’m not knocking it, it’s incredible. I know Adobe Premiere is another one that a lot of schools have access to, and you might have it, if you know it, if you put any time into it, it’s a really superb package.

Brent Warner
Yeah, those are both fairly advanced Adobe Premiere is like movie editing. It is I mean, straight up movie heading. But Camtasia is pretty advanced. But you know, if you’re trying to get some little fancy with your videos, and do call outs, and, you know, add a lot of the features in there. I used to work with it a bit. And it was pretty great. Like, you know, when I when I was doing that kind of editing, it was like, Okay, I like a lot of these tools. So I can see where people who are looking for a little bit higher end would definitely find some value out of it.

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. It’s It is a great package.

Brent Warner
And then also point out to the Adobe Premiere thing or or Camtasia. Even though we’re talking about these, these are not free programs, but as you mentioned, many schools have them and just don’t tell their faculty. I mean, I know this to be true, because it’s like I had to do searching around when I was a previous schools, and I’d be like, okay, what’s going on? And then it’s like, some secret back page. I was like, Oh, yeah, if you just send us send this one person who works in the basement, an email, it’s like, okay, like, shouldn’t this be front page information for faculty? So do the research. If you’re, if you’re not an IV seed, go figure it out, see what you can find?

Tim Van Norman
Absolutely. And by the way, we do have access to both of those Adobe Premiere, you can run on your personal computer Camtasia we have to install on one of ours. But that said there’s a number of other packages. Brent, you had a couple of them that you had thought of as well.

Brent Warner
Yeah. Well, I know. I know. You like screencast o Matic and i i like it too. I have an I got a pretty good subscription a three year, three year subscription on sale for 36 bucks. Yeah, no, it is 36 bucks, but I actually got it on sale for 22 bucks.

Tim Van Norman
Oh, wow, I looked it up today. And this is what I had paid was a 36 that is so cheap. 22 man.

Brent Warner
Yeah, I know. It’s it’s cheap regardless. Like you don’t have to worry about it. But But, you know, well, I mean, you do like it’s not fair because it costs money. And people people, you know, put their own money into these things. But I do like screencast o Matic pretty well, it gets the job done, right.

Tim Van Norman
It’s very simple. In both ways. It’s not complicated to do, but it also is not going to do a really good job of really complicated, you know, three tracks of voice and stuff like that coming in it, it will not be able to handle very well, but for whatever I’ve needed, it’s nice and quick.

Brent Warner
Yeah, so for me and this is maybe a Mac thing, I’m not sure but the one issue that I’ve had is that I can launch it once and I can record but when I stop it and then try to go again it glitches out and it’s like go give me access again to the root things like that is what has stopped me from loving it. And I’ve moved to explore different options. Because of that.

Tim Van Norman
I understand I wound up having that problem on my Windows computer, but it was after I had recorded. Now granted, this was I was doing, you know, 20 recordings in a row type of thing. And after I’d record every three to five, it would have that problem. I’d close the program, reopen the program and start all over again. And it worked. Yeah, but but I’d had to close it out of everything, you know, almost like reboot my computer type of close it out. Yeah. Like, you shouldn’t have to know that felt funky. Yes. Okay, that that’s fairly new. So I’m hoping they fix it in their latest. But Mac also has some other tools that I’m not as familiar with. Yeah, but I’ve heard about, you know, me being a Windows guy. One of the reasons I’ve thought about buying a Mac, actually.

Brent Warner
Well, I mean, of course, the famous Mac one is iMovie. Right? So with iMovie, like it’s built right in, part of the reason they always say like Mac is such a premium price. And like it’s expensive, more expensive than a Windows machine, or this used to be the old argument. But like, it came with a full suite of massive tools that would cost you an extra $1,000. Just to add on top of your windows. Right.

Tim Van Norman
So with their go, there you go with the extra price. Yeah, it’s paid for. Yes, yeah. So.

Brent Warner
So I think, you know, I would say that if someone’s listening, that’s a Mac person, they’re already familiar with iMovie, because like, they did such a big push on that for so many years, although it’s not as strong these days. Some other ones that are not Mac exclusive. A lot of the ones that are popular screencastify is a really, really big one amongst teachers. So screencastify and screencast o Matic are fairly similar to each other. Same type of thing, click it. The nice thing I like about screencastify is that it goes into a Chrome browser. And so you can just click it right there on your extensions and make it work, which is pretty good feature. Another one that I’ve gotten access to is called weave video. And some of my teacher friends are just nuts about it. They say this is like, whatever iMovie used to have, and they kind of have dropped over the last couple years, we’ve video has picked it up and just run like they like really good, really well done. And the great thing is it’s all online. So all online editing. So it just you don’t have to have anything special you can you know, if you just need a high speed internet connection.

Unknown Speaker
Nice.

Brent Warner
And then the last one, this is the one that I’ve been moving towards the most is loom Have you played with this one, Tim?

Tim Van Norman
I’ve never heard of it, actually.

Brent Warner
So loom is great. Basically, you can get a free teacher’s account. So easy. It’s easy install, you click it, it starts running, it does a little circle down in the bottom, and it it so you can have your face it’s recording you and a little circle down in the bottom. And then it kind of tracks you so if you’re moving around like the camera on it tracks you to like what like a digitally tracks to you. So the the circle moves a little bit to follow you around and make sure that you’re basically centered. But very straightforward, easy online editing, one click in one click out. And then you can do trimming and you know a couple of basic editing things. And with a teacher’s account or with it, basically you just have to have an Edu account. And, and you can get free access to it. So loom is one worth playing with if you’re looking for another simple choice.

Tim Van Norman
Nice. That sounds great. So as we’re closing down this particular segment, I want to remind everybody, please caption your videos after you edit them. You know, if you if you have you know, chop off the first 10 minutes of your video, but you don’t do that with your caption file. They’re no longer properly captioned at all. Because the caption file isn’t going to know that you chopped off 10 minutes, and the caption files are to the second. So you want to make sure that that’s taken care of. Another part is make sure you’re storing your videos in a place where they can be obtained by other people viewed by other people. So it’s really great to storm on your desktop in order to play it in zoom. Right. And I do that all the time. But the moment that I want to share it with somebody else, I can’t share it off on my desktop. So throw it in Google Drive, throw it in YouTube, Vimeo, three C Media as some sort of streaming service. All of those also give you the ability to caption or upload a caption file. So you don’t have to worry about that. You can do that with all of those. But do definitely make sure you’re putting your videos someplace where people can actually access them. The people that you want to have access to them.

Brent Warner
Yeah, so yeah, that It’s once it’s streaming, you don’t have to worry about it, they can go access whenever they like. Get it up online. Okay, so for today’s Zippy tip, Tim, I have been loving this extension called mote mo te. And it’s just mote dot m. e is a website. Basically, this is a Google Sheets and Google, Google Docs and Google Slides add on, you can click on anything on your dock. And with a single click on the comments, you can leave a voice message built right into the docs. This is great for a class like mine, where I want to give feedback, maybe a little bit more complicated idea, but I also want my students to hear my intonation, right? Because I always worry about the, you know, like the flat tone of writing, right? It’s like, change this, hey, do this do this, like it gets a little bit aggressive feeling. And I think, you know, the younger generation is a little bit more like, hey, I want you to know, I need to feel that you’re actually talking to me. And so this is a really, really great tool, I have just fallen in love with it. And I think we’ll talk about it more in depth in the future. But if you’re interested, you can get a trial for 30 days, and I think I’ll put in a link, I think I get an extra 30 days. So maybe up to 60 days, if you go check out in the higher ed tech podcast.com show notes, we’ll put it in there. So you can get an extra long trial if you want to use it.

Tim Van Norman
Nice.

Brent Warner
Okay, so Tim, we were talking a little bit about kind of a little bit of a loose concept of making changes in the classroom, right? A lot of times teachers start getting ideas, they’re saying, Hey, I heard about this thing on the higher ed tech podcasts, or whatever it is, right? So you know, or just recognizing that they need to make changes that things aren’t working as well as they want it for their flow. Maybe they want to make a change in the middle of the semester. Maybe they want to prep for it for next semester. But you had kind of brought this idea up because you said a few teachers have come and talk to you about it. So. So what are you hearing from teachers?

Tim Van Norman
Well, basically, for us, we’re now five weeks into the semester. So hopefully, most of your classes have gotten to the point where things are fairly stable. You might even be starting to get into your first set of midterms or something like that. So this is often a time when we’re being stable. You can you can sit back and just try to relax. Or you can try to make some tweaks to things that maybe you don’t like as much. And people are starting to ask those questions. Maybe they don’t like the way certain things are happening. Or maybe their students are asking about something and they’ve never heard of it before. So is this a good time to make changes? Is this a good time to investigate changes? How do we do it, and thought this might be a good time to talk about making changes. And part of what I wanted to bring out first thing is a huge warning. Don’t change your whole class up just because you heard it on iread tech podcast

Brent Warner
what you’re saying not to flip everything upside down and then destroy your life?

Tim Van Norman
That last statement.

Brent Warner
Yeah. Well, we always do give the advice one thing at a time, make sure you know what you’re doing with it. And then and then move on to the next thing is you’re ready.

Tim Van Norman
Always Always. And so this can be a very good time to make changes in your classroom. As long as you’re being careful and you’re choosing which change to make. So one of the things that’s come up really recently is I’ve had several faculty come to me and say, Hey, this chord, and we use it should we use it? What is it

Brent Warner
Discord is blowing up!

Tim Van Norman
Everybody talks about discord these days. And there are some people who are asking if they can run their whole class on Discord. And I don’t know the answer to that. Because frankly, I’m not that familiar with Discord. But that said you scored is going up.

Brent Warner
Yeah, you can technically, if but you definitely do a major change to what your class is because there’s not video inside of it. It’s like maybe I’m speaking wrongly, so I want to be careful. But anyways, yeah, so

Tim Van Norman
let’s continue. So but but discord right now, that’s where a lot of students are. So I had one teacher come to me and say, hey, my students are asking if I could if we could, if they can create a Discord server for this class, and would I be okay with it? And could I join it and what do you say and I’m like, I’m jumping up down saying yes, because to me, what the students have just done is they’ve walked out of your class. They’ve All gone to the cafeteria and sat down to eat and talk about whatever they want to talk about together. Yeah. That’s what they would do on campus. Now. They’re just doing it online. And they’re having these conversations. they’ve invited you into it, man, that’s even better. Yeah. But, but that also, it can allow for that outside communication that so many people right now are begging for.

Brent Warner
For sure. discord allows for interest, we could maybe do a later allender longer conversation on Discord. But I agree. You know, I think I mentioned in the past that my son says like he’s over at Cal State Fullerton. And he says, you know, as soon as they get into the class, the first thing that can start doing is texting each other. here’s here’s the discord server, the private Discord server the teacher doesn’t know about, but like every class, he said, it just happens automatically. So this is definitely a thing. If you’re getting invited into your students discord, that’s great too, because then you can support them and talk to them and say, hey, there’s a misunderstanding here or didn’t i didn’t clarify or whatever it is,

Tim Van Norman
too. And it’s also something that is not recorded by the school has nothing to do with the school. So you have those, the students can often feel freer to do stuff. On the other hand, it is not recorded by this, it is often students may feel freer to use things and say things. So do be careful. You’re still responsible or working with your students, even if they’re, you know, every you’re working with them. But I’ve seen classes that here’s the discord server, and here’s zoom, and here’s this and as ways of getting a hold of the instructor and things like that. I think that’s great. This is a great time to do that. And and if you don’t know about it, ask your students Yeah, besides communication tools, you may want to take a look at maybe video tools we’ve got, for instance, at IVC, we’ve got play posit, we’ve got some other video tools that you can work with that might do some really cool things in your class. And it’s a good time to just introduce maybe one video here a video, they’re even adding additional videos, new content that way, we’ve just added Padlet, which we talked about on our last episode, flipgrid, anything like that, and this might be a good time to just add in some of those things, one of those things at a time, and just see how it works. Does it work in your class? Does it work for your class? Those types of things?

Brent Warner
Yeah, I think here, here, we’ve got this like, difference between the couple of things going on here, right? Because if you’re saying, Hey, I’m thinking about moving my whole class over to discord, that’s a pretty massive change, right? Like, that’s like a entire structural change to how you’re running your class, I would caution strongly against trying to do something like that in the middle of the semester. But you could go and say, hey, I want to explore it with my students on the side as a back channel, right. And then, and then consider using that in the future with things like Padlet or flipgrid, or, you know, even play pause it, those can start as individual assignments and then become a part of your regular repertoire. Instead of like, that is not the entire basis of your teaching structure. Right. And so actually looking at those in different ways, I always, I, you know, we said one at a time, but like, I if I find a tool that I want to play with, I’ll just throw it in and play with it and see what happens, right? I’m just right into it. And let’s, let’s figure it out, if it’s gonna work or not, but for something like something massive, like a discord, or, you know, for me for moving to knucks, and you know, those types of things, that is a big change that I had to carefully consider and recognize, okay, what’s going to happen? How is this communication going to be different with the students, all of those types of things? So we so we want to kind of distinguish maybe platforms from tools, I guess. Exactly. And even even the tools when you talk about when you find something cool, you go ahead and try it out.

Tim Van Norman
You number one, you didn’t change your whole class, but the other is that you’re not trying out, okay, today, we’re gonna try out Padlet flipgrid. And all at the same day, right? You know, do ease them in. Unless it’s the first day of class, you know, they don’t know any better at that point. And you can go with it. But the other thing is if you’re thinking about a new textbook, or a new way of doing something, introducing small pieces, like we were just talking about during the semester is often a good way to get you prepped for the next semester.

Brent Warner
Yeah, good point. So let’s talk about this for a second. Because if you’re trying to move to Ztc, zero textbook cost, this is exactly what you should do. So you should say, hey, instead of using the textbook to talk about this topic, and this unit, I’m going to go find the resources for free, available online. And I’m going to build out my own individual unit without using the textbook and see how the students respond to it this time. When you’re on a textbook, you have the safety of being able to go back and saying, Hey, guys, we’re trying this, but it’s not really working very well. Let’s stick with the book for now. Like, you know, you can have that when the students have already paid for that book. But if you just suddenly said, Okay, my whole semester is going to be no textbook, right? Which I, I encourage, but but you know, if you if you don’t know what you’re doing, or if you haven’t planned that out, then when you run out of things, you can’t just go Okay, go buy the textbook for this week, right? And you can’t, you can’t, if it’s not on your syllabus, then it’s not a requirement for the students to get right. So definitely a good way to consider stepping into it.

Tim Van Norman
Well, I’m to that point, many people have found that it takes three semesters to go from a textbook to Ztc, just because of the work. And this is, again, that same type of thing, switching parts of it at a time, rather than just one day you’re on textbook The next day, you’re off. So. So one question that I think a lot of people are concerned about is how fast is too fast to fix something that’s broken? And how fast do you decide to pull the plug? My argument is, it depends on you as the teacher. But sometimes if it doesn’t work the first time, that might be the time to pull the plug.

Brent Warner
Okay, can you give us an example,

Tim Van Norman
if you, if you’re trying, you decide to switch and use Google meet, for instance, and your students can’t figure out how to get into it, and you’re spending all kinds of time trying to figure that out, yet, you have been working in zoom just fine. And all you need to do is give them the link to zoom. And it’s the same link that they’ve used all semester, that might be a good transition. By the way, my suggestion is, in those types of communication cases, maybe take your office hours or your student hours, and put them on the other tool. And try that out. That will get you and the students used to it. One on One, rather than the whole class all of a sudden not showing up for a class. So it’s figuring that out where that is broken, not broken. Back to somebody and oh, I want to use I want to do with quizzes, should I go to this extreme. And I’m like, whoa, hold on. You know, it’s it’s not broken. So we need to fix it. On the other hand, I’ve had other people who it is broken, throw away the Tool and move on to the next tool. So it can be both. But number one, don’t be afraid to pull the plug. If something’s not working, all the plug, move on to something else, or move back. If something is working, but maybe a little off, talk to people, you may meet a setting change. But that’s where maybe you don’t want to pull the plug right away. But be ready to pull the plug. If it’s hindering your class stop. Yeah, yeah. Always. It’s about you in your interaction with your students. If that doesn’t work, move on to something,

Brent Warner
here’s a little side hint to, if you tell your students that something you’re using doesn’t work, and you’re gonna cancel it. They’re usually okay with that. Because it’s like, one less assignment for them. Or, you know, there could be any settings, but I’ve never had my students go, I can’t believe you tried this thing and it didn’t work. And then you stopped use it, right? Like, I do that type of stuff all the time. But like you can, you know, the students are super forgiving of it. So what if it doesn’t work? You know, it’s the same thing as you being forgiving of your students saying, Hey, I couldn’t get this going and cool. Okay, I get it. That makes sense. I couldn’t get it going either. So we’re gonna have to try something different. And that happens in life all the time. So, you know, give yourself a break.

Tim Van Norman
And if you give yourself a break, and you give them a break, they will give you a break. So if you don’t understand a new tool, should you try it? It depends. Things like we were talking about discord before. Maybe talk to your students. Hey, students, are you interested in this? Let’s play with this. They’ll love it. Okay, the love that you’re trying things out. If you come in and you say, I’m the discord Master, and I’m going to determine all this stuff, and you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re gonna fall on your face. So, should you try it? Yes. But be careful in talking in communicating with your students. And they will work, they will work with you.

Brent Warner
Yeah, this is I, we might have mentioned this in a previous show, but like, students are now judging teachers on their abilities to use tools, right? And so you need to come straight and clear with it. So hey, if you say, I don’t really know how to use this thing, but I’m going to try. They’ll give you all all the all the slack you need. If you tell them, we’re going to be using this tool, how do I use it? I don’t know. Clear around, figure it out. That’s a totally different thing. So it’s all really about the approach to it I in my experience, so definitely, you know, if you don’t understand it, do a little research, try and figure out the basics of it. Get started, do yourself a set yourself up as a student as an example. You could come to, you know, work with a colleague and get some help us have someone do it on the other side with you. All those types of things are great ways to explore, and I do highly recommend them. But, you know, it’s you want to have some information when you’re going in some way of knowing what you’re doing and why you’re doing it with that tool.

Tim Van Norman
Exactly. Thank you for listening today. In this episode, we talked about editing videos and making changes in your classroom. For more information about this show, please visit our website at the higher ed tech podcast.com. There you will find our podcasts and links to the information we’ve covered.

Brent Warner
As always, we do want your feedback. So please go to the higher ed tech podcast.com and let us know your thoughts. And if you have ideas for future shows. There’s a link on that page where you can give us some of your topic ideas.

Tim Van Norman
Wherever everyone at IVC that’s listening. If you need help with technology questions, please contact IVC technical support at 949-451-5696 or by emailing IVC tech@ivc.edu. If you have questions about technology in your classroom, please contact me Tim Van Norman at tvannorman@ivc.edu.

Brent Warner
If you want to reach out to me about the show, you can find me on Twitter or Instagram at @BrentGWarner.

Tim Van Norman
I’m Tim VanNorman,

Brent Warner
and I’m Brent Warner. And we hope this episode has helped you on the road from possibility to actuality. Have a good one everyone. Take care