Are you a teacher struggling to connect with students? Since the start of the pandemic, teachers have searched for ways to build and maintain connections with their students.  You can keep students focused and engaged with their learning without having to spend a ton of time. Videos, whether it’s a live call or recorded, can help bridge the connections and it’s fairly easy to do.  Here are ways to stay connected and the video editing tools to help you get it done.  

Create Authentic Connections 

You may need to rethink the way you interact with your students.  For example, by now everyone knows how powerful Zoom meetings can be for learning. 

Even so, Zoom makes it easy for students who are already shy to sit quietly in the background and listen without ever speaking up. Additionally, how do you handle students who miss a class? Situations like these are where personalized videos come into play. A personalized video gets you face-to-face with individual students. 

Need to check in with a quiet student, or get to know them better? Instead of scheduling a meeting, which may conflict with their family’s schedule, create a screencast with ScreenPal’s free screen recorder to make a quick pre-recorded video for them. This way they can see your face and hear your tone of voice, both of which can be reassuring and promote confidence. 

Encourage students to send you a video response to help them get more comfortable speaking up. If they have a Chromebook, they can use the Chromebook Video Editor to create a video. They can use this video editing tool to add their personality or creativity by adding emoticons, text, music, and more. These videos are a great way to know your students. You can also share it with the rest of the class to build relationships among your students.

So what about absentees? When a student misses a live class, there’s no need to redo your lecture for them. Just plan ahead by recording your Zoom session, and use this Zoom integration to get it ready for your students to watch on their own time. Quickly edit and cut out boring silences or student chatter, and add helpful edits like closed captions, text callouts, and highlights to help your students focus. You can add presentation slides, graphics, or video overlays. Even better, you can save the finished video and use it for exam study or future classes.

Strengthen With Valuable Feedback

Many teachers report that students rarely take advantage of virtual office hours. Maybe students feel awkward, maybe they don’t have access to a computer at that time, or maybe they just haven’t taken the initiative. Whatever the case, pre-recorded video is a better way to give your students the feedback they need to grow. 

If it’s pre-recorded, it’s not another virtual meeting students have to attend. Plus, they may not realize they need help, so it gives you a chance to help students who wouldn’t otherwise ask. 

If, for example, you need to give feedback on an essay a student wrote, just open the screen recorder and pop their essay up on the screen. Record your feedback as you go down the page, and when you finish, enhance your video in the video editor. 

From there, add visual aids. Use video editing tools to highlight portions of the text as you discuss them, add an arrow showing where a correction should go, draw on the screen to cross out errors, and zoom in or out for better visibility. 

With this level of personal feedback, you’ll be able to help students learn from their mistakes while also building up their self-esteem.

Save Time and Increase Productivity

Since starting e-learning, have you found yourself repeating things over and over? All that repetition adds up and takes a toll on your productivity. Instead of giving the same instructions five times, use efficient video tools to save time.

If you’re sharing instructions or special tips for a class assignment over Zoom, hit record and when you’re finished, open your recording in the video editor. You can add closed captions for accessibility and make any edits that might provide helpful context for students. This could include things like image overlays, text callouts, or even additional video clips. 

You can save and share your video so students can watch it as many times as needed. This way you can save yourself the hassle of answering the same question more than once or repeating the whole lesson for students who were absent. You can even save and reuse the same video the next time you assign the project for new students.

While it may seem like enough to provide written instructions, some students simply do better with a video. They can watch and re-watch videos on their own time. Providing this will drastically reduce the amount of time you spend answering basic questions, giving you more freedom to support students as they work through the assignment. You’ll spend more time guiding complex conversations and making connections, not giving basic instructions.

Build Stronger Connections

We hope these new tips and video editing tools will help you build stronger connections with your students, and help get them excited about learning together. 

If you’re looking for creative ways to use video, we encourage you to take a look at ‘25 Creative Ways to Use ScreenPal’ for ideas to engage students.