How did I come up with video warm-ups?
 
It all started when I was asked to teach AP Calculus. For some teachers, that may be no big deal. Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret of mine….I was not a math major. My major was accounting. Therefore, I only took a few math courses in college. Regardless, I was excited and eager for the challenge. I remember loving Calculus in high school and college.
 
I was sent to an AP summer seminar for training. Oh boy, I quickly learned I was in over my head. Everyone in my seminar was a math major and had taken several levels of Calculus in college. The last time I took a calculus course, was 14 years prior when I was a freshman in college. I was definitely a little rusty. The seminar was a weeklong and there were moments I thought the instructor and my classmates were speaking a different language. Luckily, I made friends with a nice group of ladies that took me under their wing and helped me through it all. I decided that I could do this, but it was going to require a lot of hard work the first year.
 
I received a lot of awesome resources from the seminar that I planned on implementing in my class. However, I was still nervous. I knew I’d be re-teaching a lot of the topics to myself and therefore not as solid in my knowledge of the content as I was for the other classes I taught. This made me realize that I cannot be the only instructor my Calculus students could rely on for information. Not a problem, right? I can just ask a math colleague to assist when needed, right? Wrong. I am a one-person department. Yep, I was about to teach AP Calculus for the first time, along with my three other courses – Algebra 1, Algebra 2, and Precalculus and no other person was around to help me.
 
I had to come up with a plan. That’s when it dawned on me that there are tons of math videos on YouTube. I spent the rest of my summer and part of the school year, finding videos on YouTube to coincide with every section in my textbook that I needed to cover for the AP exam. I didn’t want to use the videos to flip my classroom, because I still wanted to be my student’s main instructor, and answer any questions they had as we worked our way through the content. But, I did want them to be introduced to each topic by another math teacher through a short video, so they would come to class with some prior knowledge of the day’s lesson objective. Then, before I started the lesson, I would give them a warm-up based on what was covered in the video. I did this for two reasons, to confirm they watched the video and to help me gage to what extent they understood it.
 
After we got through the first unit, I could tell it was working. The students liked learning from several teachers and seeing the content taught a few times helped them grasp the material quickly. I shared a few units of the warm-ups with a colleague of mine from another school because he shared several of his resources with me and I wanted to return the favor. A short while later, he emailed me asking for more video warm-ups. He said his students loved them and wanted more! That's when I knew I was onto something. I began making them for my Algebra 2 class as well. And guess what, they loved them too!

Through this process I discovered several other benefits video warm-ups have, which I will share in another post. 

Here are my other posts on video warm-ups:

• What is a video warm-up?
• Why use video warm-ups?

There are two parts to this method:​
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Part 1 – A short video that I find on YouTube that briefly explains the next day’s concept. I try to find videos that are less than 6 minutes for Algebra 2 and less than 12 minutes for Calculus. These videos are not meant to replace a lesson, but only give a small introduction to the new concept. I use many different math teachers' videos, so the students see a variety of teachers and styles. The students are to watch the video BEFORE they come to class when the new concept is introduced.  I post the link on Google Classroom, so it’s easy for them to access. I tell my students that it requires very little of their time because the videos are short and they don’t need to take notes. Almost every teenager has a phone these days, so they can literally watch it on the bus on the way to school. It's that simple.
 
Part 2 – A half page warm-up with one or two questions that students should be able to answer after watching the video. I usually have the warm-up printed and place it on each student’s desk before they enter the room, so they can work on it right away. We go over the warm-up together, which allows me to get a good feel for how easy or difficult this lesson is going to be for the class. It’s neat to see students get excited for the day’s lesson because they already have an idea of what they are going to learn. My struggling students LOVE the videos, as it gets them a head start on the content for the day!...but more about the benefits in another post.

Well, there you have it! Now you know of a new warm-up method that you may even want to try in your class. I'm so glad to finally get this idea out there. When people see the name “video warm-up”, I’m sure many things come to their mind. Maybe they think students watch a video as the warm-up or it’s a flipped classroom method. Well, it’s neither. I think of it as a unique and fun way to introduce a new lesson. It only requires a few minutes before class and few minutes in the beginning of class, and has awesome advantages.

Check out my other posts on video warm-ups:

• How did I come up with video warm-ups?
• Why use video warm-ups?