On Thursday, September 7th I gave a talk to the North Texas School of Talent Education community.

I’ve been learning from Daina and Charles for years. It was an honor to present alongside them and a few other amazing colleagues.

I’m going to give a brief description of what I said and share my handout.

I believe in recording every single lesson.

I have footage dating back to 2015. I have 35 students. I record up to 1,400 videos a year.

I don’t share these videos– but I do record them.

And I wish more teachers did this.

Why?

1. Beyond Time. Recording allows you to step out of the boundaries of time. To study what you’ve done. To share what you’ve done. To keep a record of what has happened.

2. Transparency. You allow yourself to be seen – even just by yourself. You show an arc of growth. You have the ability to share that growth with your parents, students, and teachers.

3. Practice. You can actually practice with the footage you collect. Have colleagues look over the footage and suggest changes. Caption the videos and study your language. Pause and re-say what you were trying to say in the video.

4. Collect data. Videos hold so much more information than notes ever could. By taking footage you allow future versions of yourself to look back on patterns you might not know about now.

5. Leverage. You record it once, but you can use it forever. Time and space limit us. But with media we do it once and it is infinitely re-playable.
This might feel overwhelming if you don’t have a simple set up.

I use…

• Canon EOS M50 to record
• Rode Video Micro for sound (always attached to the camera)
• SD card (so big I don’t have to change it out)
• LaCie Hard Drive where I can keep an entire semester of videos

This costs less than $1,000 and requires minimal effort beyond the teaching I’m already doing.

Many teachers struggle to record themselves for Practicum and the Certificate of Achievement.

I think it’s because the use of camera feels overwhelming and high stakes.

The camera, the archive, and the footage have become normal to us. So when I go to present something in public I’m pulling from a bank of thousands of videos. I know I am bigger than the one video I’m showing. My identity, and self worth, is not bound up by the one video I caught.

Using these tools I’ve built an archive I’ll be able to look back on and use forever.

I hope you consider doing the same.