I recently had the pleasure of working with Catherine Cronin (@catherinecronin) on an education project – an experience that I would highly recommend. This project involved creating a video  promoting the use of ICT in the classroom by highlighting examples provided by a range of teachers across the country. The video below is the final product with the various stages and tips available below the video

• Articulate the idea in a Google docs and share it with your collaborators. By sharing through Google docs (or something similar) it prevents different versions of the same document being created.
• Circulate an introduction to the idea requesting volunteers through the most appropriate forum – in our case a Google groups mailing list and twitter with an appropriate hashtag (ours was#edchatie).
• Include a link on this message allowing people to fill in their details if they wanted to volunteer – again a Google form can be used to collate this information. Replying to an e-mail to volunteer just gets messy. Another  tip is to include  questions on this form asking the volunteer to include contact details  i.e. Mark Glynn, from School X . This will ensure that you will get the correct spelling and also ensure that you have the same level of information from each volunteer, keeping your acknowledgement slide at the end of your video consistent
• Ask your volunteers to create as much of the material for you – minimising your workload. Considering the varied imagination and ability of people if you are looking for something like a series of powerpoint slides you might be better off providing them with a template to fill in rather than getting 50 different powerpoint slides with 50 different fonts, styles and layouts. In the case of videos set up a dropbox account so they can send the files to you. Sending them over e-mail will not working as most video files will be too big. Better still ask them to post them onto Youtube or something similar and just send you the link. Please remind your volunteers to consider school/college policy on  videoing students etc. Get them to send you an e-mail confirming that they have sought permission from participants / parents where appropriate. This just removes a headache for you further down the line

Once all of that is done the rest is easy as it is all in your control

The key recommendation at this stage is proper preparation. Prepare your resource by producing a storyboard. There are numerous templates available so don’t re-invent the wheel.

The software that you use is crucial too. I use Camtasia which is a commerical product, well worth the €150 my boss paid for it 🙂 but I believe Windows movie maker, which is free, is quite easy to use as well and of course everything on the Apple is supposedly easy as well