(music)
A common concern instructors have as they move their courses online
is how to keep students engaged in the learning process.
If students are viewing a recording of your lecture,
how do you keep their attention with all of the distractions they may have in the environment surrounding them.
In this video, I’ll show you how to focus student’s attention with zooms and pans,
point out important details with arrows and shapes,
and make it easy for students to follow along with cursor effects.
The first way to improve engagement is by focusing attention on important details using Zoom and Pan.
Zooming makes the screen smaller or larger.
Panning moves the screen up and down or side to side.
Here I have a slide with several steps.
I want to add movement and focus to the video by zooming in on each step
as I talk through it.
I drag the playhead to the point in the video where I begin talking about step one.
To add a zoom I click on the Animations tab and make sure the Zoom and Pan tab is selected.
I’ll use the handles to resize this rectangle
and zoom in on the first step on my slide.
While I am doing this I can see the video change on my canvas here
and an arrow appears on my track indicating there is an animation during this part of the video.
I can move the arrow around if I want the zoom to occur earlier or later.
I can also stretch out the arrow to make the animation take longer,
which slows it down
or shrink it to speed the animation up.
If you are using a mac, you can get this same effect by using custom animations
and which will add an arrow to the track just like this one.
Next I want to use pan to move from the first step to the second step.
I drag the playhead to the point in the video I begin to discuss the second step.
To pan I drag the rectangle in the Zoom and Pan tab from the first to the second step.
Let’s preview our pan.
Move the playhead just before the pan animation arrow on the timeline and click play.
Nice
The second way to improve engagement is to help viewers focus on what’s important on the screen.
To do this we will use annotations.
Annotations include arrows, shapes or other effects that help draw attention to parts of the screen.
In this example I want to draw the student’s attention to the last line of code with a sketch motion annotation.
I drag the playhead to the point in the video where I want the annotation to appear.
I click Annotations
then Sketch Motion.
I’ll click on the rectangle sketch motion and drag it to the canvas.
Once I have it where I want it I let go of my mouse button.
To preview it I click the play button.
It’s not quite where I’d like it
so I’ll click on the handles to adjust the size and shape.
I also want to change the color so I’ll go over to the properties panel
and select a new color.
Let’s watch that one more time.
Perfect!
The third way to improve engagement is by adding cursor effects.
Cursor effects are helpful when you are providing step-by-step instructions on your screen.
In this example I want to show my students how to access the syllabus online.
Here I have a screen recording showing students where to click,
but my cursor is really small.
I want to make it easier to follow along.
I’ll click on Cursor Effects and view the different options.
I’d like to apply the highlight effect so I will click and drag the highlight onto my recording track.
To use a different color I’ll customize it in the properties panel.
I can also make it smaller or larger until it is just how I like it.
Next I’ll press play to see how it looks.
One last tip to keep in mind when editing is that less is more.
Too many arrows, zooms, and effects can make it difficult to focus on the video.
Now you have the skills to take that video lesson to the next level.
To learn more about annotations, zoom and pan or effects like cursor smoothing
check out our other tutorials.
Thanks for watching!