This is a guest post from my friend Rushton Hurley. Rushton is the founder of Next Vista for Learning and the author of Making Your School Something Special.

At the recent #CUE17 conference, I ran a workshop on getting a digital video project going. While a good chunk of the session was devoted to exploring several easy-to-learn tools, such as SpeakPipe Voice Recorder and Adobe Spark Video, we also took time to look at a variety of student videos.

Getting students to create videos explaining what they’ve learned can yield pretty disappointing results when students decide to record what they normally think of as teaching. One student might stand at a whiteboard to explain something, while another holds a phone (hopefully horizontally) and records it.

Giving students a variety of videos (narrated images or art, stop-motion, puppets, etc.) to consider can help them come up with much more interesting pieces.

For the workshop, I created a doc (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PEGpGrH2t-bJegz53FCrwul63iMa5DfkYsuL5U6c_fE/edit?usp=sharing) with sets of student-created videos that others could watch in order to identify strengths and weaknesses, and also brainstorm completely different approaches to exploring the video’s topic.

The doc contains instructions on ways to use the many linked videos and sets, but I think it can be better, and would love your feedback.

How can I improve it so that it better fits what you ask students to create? Please let me know at videos@nextvista.org, and if I can create something good for you, I’m happy to do so!