This is the 8th post in the Personalized Learning Series.

One of the things that has made Personalized Learning a success in my Library Media Center is video. It is no joke when I say that my students tell me, “We love you, Mrs. Mercier. We just love you more on YouTube.”

I make videos for a variety of reasons.

• Video is the tech language my students speak. They. Love. YouTube. So, why not meet them where they’d rather be?
• Why reinvent my lessons every time I teach them? This way I can recycle as needed. I am actually in the process of weeding my videos because some of them are already obsolete for my current curriculum.
• It has helped me refine my teaching points. Video has forced me to get to the heart and meat of what I want to teach. I am proud to say that I am a 3 minute librarian.

Most of the videos I make are screencasts. If they are not, I enlist students to help me produce them. There are two ways that I screencast: Screencastify and iPad Record.

Screencastify

Screencastify is great for recording your desktop. You can also use it to record yourself from your desktop. If you install it on Google Chrome, it can automatically save your videos to Google Drive. After recording, you can also save to YouTube. These are great options for sharing videos with students.

iPad Recording

The iPad has a built in option to record the iPad screen. This is great to show kids how to use apps or other iPad features. After recording, it is saved to your Photo Album and you can upload them to Google Drive and/or YouTube to share with students.

Once the videos are created, there are a lot of ways that you can share them.

• When I have a collection of videos about circulating books, I put them in a Google Drive folder, make the folder public and then create a QR Code for students to scan to watch the videos.
• Other times, I keep them in a Google Drive folder and upload them to YouTube. Then I have playlists that are linked on the library media website.
• Other times, I embed them into our gamified learning paths.
• Other times, I link them directly into Seesaw or a Playlist.

One of the cool things about having videos online is that my students go to them for fun! After they finish learning whatever it is they learned on my awesome video, they’ll dig into more on a related topic or checkout another playlist. What? Unsolicited learning? Yes, please!