Making Your First How-To Video

Rather than sending emails back-and-forth to get your message across, send your students a How-To video to demonstrate exactly what you mean.

1. Set up your digital environment

Hide your desktop icons. On Windows this can be done by Right-clicking on the desktop, choosing View and deselecting Show Desktop Icons.

Close or turn off notifications from programs so that they do not appear on your screen.

Have programs open and ready for recording before hitting the red record button.

Windows desktop with right click menu open pointing to show desktop items.

2. Draw attention to key parts

Zoom and Pan helps to focus on areas of the screen

Annotations, like callouts, arrows, and text, offer clarity for your viewers

3. Make your videos repeatable

Create a Template to easily repeat a video style:

  • Use Placeholders to create sections in your video that can be used in varying videos
  • Save as a Template to quickly recreate a video in a previous style, based on a video you already created
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