Everyone loves a good video. It captures students’ attention in a way no other teaching device does. Though we do many tech and hands-on non-tech activities with students, video effectively introduces informational material better than anything else. I find students are even absorbed with narrated slides presented as a video!

I’ve used videos with students for 25 years, from laserdiscs as an at-risk high school science teacher to online streaming as a middle school librarian, but I don’t show any video that runs more than ~15 minutes. Whether it’s an educational or commercial video, even Bill Nye gets old after 15 minutes!

Years ago I attended a seminar presented by PBS about using video in the classroom. The gist of the training was that showing snippets of video interspersed with interactive questioning or discussion produced higher levels of learning than showing the entire uninterrupted video, especially for videos longer than 7-8 minutes. Apparently the optimal attention span for video in the classroom is 3-5 minutes.

For this reason, I look for videos within a 3-8 minute length. YouTube, for example, has a filter that allows you to search for video under 3 minutes or 3-20 minutes. Vimeo filters for under 4 minutes or 4-10 minutes. Both of these services have an array of educational videos on many topics and are usually free of charge. We can also find short, free videos from educational providers and from the U.S. Government—you can find free Online Safety videos on the FTC Consumer Information website.

Alas, sometimes the only way to use video to present a concept is by making one ourselves. I’ve created a few videos for Library Lessons using desktop and online applications, and here I present 6 of them. Feel free to use any of them for your own library instruction!

LIBRARY ORIENTATION VIDEOS

Library Orientation is the first library visit of the school year. Our lowest-grade-level students are new to the school and library, so we need to help them feel at home in this strange new environment. I have a short activity to familiarize them with the Fiction area, then show them a video I created on “How to choose a good book” to read. Students follow along with a small ¼-sheet checklist, which they then take with them to find their first Fiction book to check out. I created this as a narrated Microsoft PPT, then saved as a video.

It’s silly for students to hang on to a book for weeks without finishing it, so I address this at all grade level orientations (2^nd visit for newbies, 1^st visit for higher grades) using this video. I created “Use the 20-page Guide to Decide” on GoAnimate.

ACADEMIC HONESTY VIDEO

My Academic Honesty lesson uses short videos to great advantage. To meet National School Library Standards for conceptual understanding and CCSS for documentation (bibliographic information, citation, plagiarism), I teach 3 legal concepts—intellectual property, copyright, and fair use—with a flow of videos that imparts these complex concepts in a meaningful way, yet the total of all video time is only 14 minutes.

When teaching intellectual property I discuss bibliographic citation, and I find students (and many adults) are confused by the term “cite,” so the first video I ever created alleviates the confusion between 3 homophones. Here is my “Sight-Site-Cite” video, created with Windows PhotoStory.

AN EXAMPLE VIDEO BOOKTALK

We know it’s important to show students the kind of end product we expect when we assign a project. That’s particularly true for technology products they’ve not done before. To preview an upcoming ELA assignment, I created this “Video Booktalk Example” to show them how easy they are to make. Actually, I created two. Here’s the first I made by uploading photos to Adobe Spark and adding text and transitions:

Here’s the nearly identical one I created with Google Slides, uploading the photos, adding text, and downloading each slide as an image, then uploading all of them to Kizoa to create the video.

AN INTRODUCTION TO MEDIA LITERACY

We can’t discuss using videos without also addressing the issue of the misuse of video. Especially now, we need our students to become aware of how pervasive media is and how it influences our behaviors and decisions. I created the following video as an introduction to a Media Literacy lesson for my 6g students.

USE MY FREE VIDEOS IN YOUR SCHOOL LIBRARY

If you’ve watched these 6 videos, you have spent only about 15 minutes total, yet you can see the power of video is very effective to introduce procedures, explain complex concepts, or model examples to students.

These embedded videos are all from my YouTube channel. You can also find them on my Vimeo channel! Use them, and any other of my FREE videos, as you wish, in your own School Library Lessons!

Updated 2026.