Levent Erdoğan provides online teaching advice and how Clips can serve as a great starting point for any teachers new to making videos.

In this “new norm” of online teaching, where many teachers are still struggling around the world to provide engaging educational content for their students, creating a video lesson is one of the more popular choices, but can be scary to less savvy teachers. As a ‘video guy’ one of the most common questions I get is “Where do I start?”, and I often reply with “Wherever is easiest, and with whatever gives you the most ‘bang for your buck.’”

There are heaps of options available these days for video creation software and apps. Some free, and some not-so-free; some user friendly, and some not. For the hesitant teacher faced with the daunting task of making their first video lesson for students, the app that will get the job done quickly and painlessly will always be the best way to go. You don’t need pizazz; you don’t need special effects; what you do need is something that will allow you to easily create a video lesson and move onto the next lesson as quickly as possible, and if the final product looks good in the process, then that’s a bonus!

One of the apps that I always recommend for teachers that checks all of these boxes is Clips (only available for iOS). This app is free for anyone with an iOS device and is very user friendly for the beginner filmmaker. The app also takes care of a lot of the difficult, nitty gritty stuff for you; it animates text seamlessly; it has an option for automatic subtitles, (which use speech-to-text technology to create subtitles); it has a selection of music to add to your projects that will be automatically edited to match your project perfectly; and you can even add some special effects, without too much difficulty.

To help beginners afraid of taking the plunge with video lessons, I’ve created a little introduction video to Clips that highlights some of its key features. Please enjoy my Intro to Clips video below. I hope you find it useful.

Special shoutout to Josefino Rivera, Jr. (@josefinor) for inspiring me to produce this article.