One of my big struggles with doing my student teaching has been feeling the urge to MAKE things. Teaching high-school kids can be rewarding, but when I don't have a personal creative outlet I get antsy and frustrated.

So, I started making instructional videos for my classes. Not only has it scratched my creative itch, but it's been a REALLY nice way to teach my students. They basically get a custom one-on-one learning experience with me that they can pause, rewind, and fast forward/watch at double speed (plus extra features like automatic closed-captioning for multi-modal learning). If there are extra questions, the real me is there in-person to answer them (which is much better than watching a kahn academy video or something non-personal online), but 90% of the students are learning without much real-me intervention.

The video method is also a huge boon for absent students who can watch my videos at home and get caught up almost immediately.

I feel like I'm on to something good for education. The last part of this blog post by Bill Gates helped spur me on to teaching this way.

https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Accelerating-Innovation

Here's one of my better videos explaining what functions are in programming and how they work (I can usually knock 2 or 3 of these videos out every day during my prep. periods):

What do YOU think?