A Complete Video Program for Youth Soccer Clubs

In our eBook we talk about 5 separate reasons video will benefit youth soccer clubs. Here are the first few lines from each of these 5 sections of our eBook.

Video for Teaching the Game

Video is now a natural component of learning everywhere -- especially for young people who can’t imagine learning without it. But in general, youth sports clubs and coaches aren’t using video as much as in other areas of education.

Video for coach development

Club directors want to make their coaches better. For one thing, the better the coaches, the less troubleshooting is required and the club’s reputation steadily improves. And then there’s success on the field.

Using video really produces results, especially when you can build a culture of feedback on coaching practice. Sure, it’s a little awkward at first, but after the camera is rolling the coaches probably relax and run their session more naturally than with a staff coach attending in person and scribbling comments on a notepad.

Video for player skills homework

Practice time is limited. Too often, especially at older age groups, individual technical skills take a back seat to drills and small-sided games. One solution is to use video to get kids to do skills homework. This has to be part of all great clubs’ video programs. All the players need is their own ball and a smartphone on a stand or in a parent’s hands.

Video for parent understanding

Club directors and us coaches need parents to understand what we’re trying to accomplish. How many times have we heard parents yelling stuff on the sideline that is counterproductive: incessant screaming of “pressure”, “great kick Taylor!”, “kick it up, Sam!”, “get rid of it”, and “send him!”.  We can ask them not to shout, but wouldn’t it be better to educate them a little so they can ask their kids the right questions after the game.

Video for player evaluations and tryouts

Finally, there’s the toughest part of every director’s job – player evaluations and team formation. How can video help?

You can use video to complement the way you do things now, or you can use it to transform player evaluation entirely.

As a complement:

For one thing, you can record evaluation (tryout) sessions. At the field, if you have 60 kids barging around you only get a few little glimpses of each player and evaluators’ judgments can be all over the map. Is it really worth having evaluators stand around and tick a few boxes or use a rating scale based on four or five touches per player? So why not record them and have staff coaches watch them later, comfortably, and use a player-rating rubric right in the video software that exports a report for you to use in team-formation meetings.

Transform your evaluations completely with video:

How much does the evaluation process currently cost in terms of registration, field costs, paying evaluators to be there in person, and getting their ratings and notes into a spreadsheet to share? Is it worth it? Are the evaluators ratings reliable, given how little they see and the artifical context the players are in? Do they correlate with the season-long judgments of your most knowledgeable, experienced coaches?

What if you put your resources into recording a couple of half-games for each team? That would help the teams, first and foremost, and your club would really stand out. (In fact it’s required by the Club License and Club Standards programs).

Don't Use YouTube!

YouTube is amazing. It is a big part of the rapid transformations in how we communicate with each other in the modern world.

Imagine if you met someone under 80 who didn’t know what YouTube was!

The problem is that YouTube is so dominant – and free – that people are trying to use it for more than it is designed for. It’s the obvious choice for sharing video privately because you can leave the video Unlisted, accessible by people who have the link. So you can share video privately by sharing a link in your group – on email or Facebook or whatever. [Fun fact: You can do this in Dropbox too, but for Basic (free) plan accounts you can only stream the first 15 minutes of a video.]

But there are serious problems with using YouTube like this.
This article tells you about much better alternatives.

Sharing Video in Groups

There are so many kinds of groups that might want to share videos privately.

• Sports teams wanting to share and discuss training and game footage
• Teachers wanting students to watch and engage with video
• Creative teams wanting to comment on drafts of videos and images
• People in the arts and crafts filming themselves to get remote coaching
• Musicians that want to critique their performances together
• Businesses that want to record their employees’ performance to make sure they’re doing things right and provide coaching so they get better
• and lots more…

but our recommendation is...

A simple feedback loop, applied in school zones in a small Californian suburb, “cut fatal injuries by about half.” (WIRED) By revealing speeding drivers’ speed to them via a giant on-street speedometer, “drivers slowed an average of 14 percent.” This effectively unraveled decades of law-enforcement dogma by proving the superior efficacy of feedback loops over punitive police surveillance, the traditional approach. Modern education has been moving slowly in this direction, but perhaps it lacks some of the tools that would enable this kind of feedback.

So what are feedback loops, what makes them so powerful, and how can they be applied to what’s going on in education thesedays?

40 years ago, Stanford professor Albert Bandura demonstrated that giving individuals clear goals and, more importantly, a means to evaluate their progress in real time, hugely boosted the likelihood that they would complete their given task. Bandura’s work has been confirmed and extended across psychology, epidemiology, military strategy, environmental studies, corporate training, engineering, and economics. The science behind the self-correcting magic of feedback loops can be broken down to four steps:

1. Collecting the data
2. Processing the data so it resonates with the subject
3. Assigning weight or consequence to the data
4. Recalibration of action as informed by the data

To use a very simple example , think about a tennis or volleyball player making a serve. If she observes the ball plow into the net, her brain instantaneously:

1. Collects the data that the serve was no good,
2. Does so in a way that makes sense to the player,
3. Tells the player that she lost a point, a consequence of the mistake,
4. Tells the player that she must strike the ball with more elevation on the next serve.

Enough serves and the player will be a top-level server due to the countless calibrations and recalibrations in this feedback loop. Ten thousand hours and all that…

What about feedback in educational programs – what problems can it solve? Consider the growing shortage of health professionals in countries like Canada. This excerpt from a 2016 Globe and Mail article sums it up best:

“The sum of all the numbers is a tightening nursing labour market,” says Karima Velji, president of the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA), said in a statement. “Immediate action is needed to stave off the potentially long-lasting trend of a shrinking [registered nurse] work force and its consequences for population health.”

What’s causing the shortage in labor supply? One theory is that numerous adult learners are unable to commit enough time to traditional face-to-face classes due to economic and family pressures. To some extent, online courses can help, but these courses don’t give the student the practice they need to perform clinical skills.

Basically, online learners need feedback and even on-campus students could use a lot more practice and feedback.  The main roadblock to more and better feedback loops in clinical programs has historically been data collection. Clinical educators have had to be present to see students performing skills and to give them the briefest of verbal feedback. Now that we’re in an age of video anywhere, anytime with smartphones and YouTube, surely there’s a way to use video for practice and feedback in clinical education. WeVu.video is betting that asynchronous video for practice and feedback at precise moments on student videos will become indispensable for skills training at scale. Using learner-recorded video uploaded to the WeVu platform, face to face student-to-teacher time can decrease considerably, lowering costs, time commitments, and even the program’s environmental footprint. But students will get more practice and more feedback that sticks with the learner.  Online education with this kind of video-for-skills-learning may mobilize thousands of mature students unable to commit to a traditional schooling hours.

Feedback is really the central element of any skills learning program across many disciplines and professions. If technology can help us get more and better feedback, it will make a huge positive impact in our education systems. Fortunately, educators are now starting to see that video technology can contribute to the active, doing, part of education, not just the watching and listening part.

Asessment of Video Assignments

Feedback. Learning during production and learning from production of video assignments.

1. Get the Square Point of Sale App from the App Store or Google Play. Install it on the phone and the tablet. We recommend doing this at someone’s home using WiFi so you don’t use the phone data. When you’ve got the app, sign in.
2. Get everything charged up. Ideally, you’ll have power accessible and you can plug in the phone and the tablet (if using) and the square card reader. But even if you don’t, you’ll just need to have a place to store the phone and tablet and reader where they can be charged overnight. Jericho Little League had an equipment storeroom next to the concession where they had the charging set up for the tablet and card reader. They left the phone plugged in and hidden in the concession.
3. Put the SIM card into the phone. Turn it on and make sure you have 3G or LTE network service indicated in the top bar and that you can browse to a webpage. Then turn on the WiFi Hotspot on the phone.
   1. Most Android phones let you do this from the notifications bar you can swipe open from the top.
   2. You’ll need to long-press Hotspot. (Or find it in Settings-Network & Internet-Hotspot & Tethering.
   3. Find something like ‘Set up Wi-Fi hotspot’. It’s best if you don’t name the Hotspot with your organization’s name because then people will notice it. It’s probably best to leave it with the default name which is likely the model of the phone.
   4. Enter a ‘Wi-Fi Password’ that you record somewhere for your organization, but don’t share it widely, otherwise your data might get used.
   5. On an iPhone:
      1. Open Settings and select Cellular or Mobile Data
      2. Tap Personal Hotspot and set it to On
      3. It’s best if you don’t name the Hotspot with your organization’s name because then people will notice it. It’s probably best to leave it with the default name which is likely the model of the phone.
      4. Tap ‘Wi-Fi Password’ and enter one that you record somewhere for your organization, but don’t share it widely, otherwise your data might get used.
4. Important! Go into the settings and turn off the updating of apps and the phone operating system. You don’t want it using up your data plan.
   1. For iPhone, disable app updates using this guide. And disable iOS updates using this one.
   2. On Android, disable apps and system updates using this guide.
5. Set up the tablet. Put it on the stand you bought. It’s best to set up the tablet with a PIN that is only known to a few people and the people who will be setting up for sales each day.
   1. First, connect it to your phone Wi-Fi hotspot. You’ll just go to your WiFi settings on the tablet, find the hotspot name from above (probably the phone model), and enter the password. Make sure you get the usual Wi-Fi bars and can get to a simple web page on the tablet browser.
   2. Turn on bluetooth from the settings menu. Put the charged-up card reader withing a few feet of the tablet.
   3. Open the Square Point of Sale app on the tablet. Go to Settings – Card Readers. Tap the Connect a reader button. Follow the instructions there, which will get you to use the little teeny button on the side of the card reader.
6. Now test the reader. In the tablet POS app, on the main menu choose Checkout. There should be a tab or a button called “Keypad”. Choose it and enter something like $1. That’ll go into a blue bar that says “Charge $1.00”. Tap that. Then you can use the card reader by inserting a card or tapping a card or a phone that has Apple Pay or Google Pay. It should work!
7. Go to Transactions on the app and see that you’ve made the transaction. If you want to try refunding that dollar transaction you can, following the guide here.
8. At the end of each day the equipment has to be returned to the charging location.

Good luck!

Once you’ve got the setup working, you’ll want to add your items to Square so that your staff and volunteers can easily tap on squares on a grid to choose the items the customer is buying. It’s cool – you can add pictures and sort items into categories like clothing or food. You can do that in the app or on a computer. Again, it’s best to do this at home or in an office using real Wi-Fi so you don’t use up your phone data plan. But Jericho did a little bit on the fly during the season and it didn’t use much data.

Here is a Word doc with instructions you can give to the people who’ll be setting up and making sales. You can edit it a bit to fit your context.

Things to consider

Some organizations use Square for both card and cash transactions so they can track revenue and inventory. You should consider whether you do it for cash as well or just card transactions.

You might want to examine some of the alternatives to Square.

You’ll have to figure out the best setup for charging to keep the equipment secure. It may be that someone has to take them home at night and return them or pass them on to the next people working.

In this two part series, I provide a guide that helps you do an effective video audition for post-secondary music programs, on a budget. I’ll dive in to the differences in sound quality between premium recording equipment, dirt cheap audio recording, and the mic that’s on your iPhone. You will be guided through the step by step procedures of how to set up this equipment, buy or borrow it cheaply, and edit it quickly with great results.

Recording video auditions can be a super stressful affair for senior students. The seemingly endless array of options when it comes to recordifng equipment or the uncertainty of whether or not your recording is of a high enough fidelity adds a lot of unnecessary stress. To address this, I’ll be going through exactly what equipment you’ll need, where to find it affordably, and how to shoot and edit your audition. At the end, I’ll be comparing the audio fidelity of a premium Shure SM7 mic, a cheap SM58 mic, and an iPhone mic as they record the same audition. Finally, I’ll point you to a free service that you can use to share your audition with the schools you apply to.

This is by no means a totally comprehensive guide to audio recording; instead, it’s a quick and dirty guide to getting your audition together on a budget.

AUDIO

THINGS YOU WILL NEED

1. iPhone (or Android, or whatever else. If you’re using your phone for audio, skip this section).

2. Digital Audio Workstation.

• §  This is software that allows you to record and edit audio.
•  Many of them are free and have great trial offers. I’ll be focusing on the ones you’d look at as a beginner.
• Garageband (Mac) is super easy to use and Ableton Live (Mac and PC) lite gives you an incredible set of capabilities

3. Audio Interface

• This is a magical box that converts the audio from your playing to information that a computer can understand.
• You get what you pay for here, but a cheap second hand 1-2 input interface like an M Audio M-Track will do just fine.
• The interface takes the XLR or 1/4 inch cable that attaches to your mic/instrument and then sends the signal into your computer.

4. Microphone (if you play anything other than guitar/bass/electric keyboard).

• If you have a good interface and use your DAW effectively, a cheap condenser mic will do. In particular, an indestructible workhorse like a Shure SM58/SM57 is great and you can find them for around $50 on Craigslist or a garage sale if you look hard enough. Here’s a guide: https://ehomerecordingstudio.com/best-cheap-mics/ . If you get one, it’s worth keeping.
• I would strongly recommend against a USB mic like Blue Snowball – they leave out a lot of the depth and dynamic range you’d get from a condenser. Only go for a USB mic if you’re on a very, very tight budget.
• For drummers, one well positioned mic will do reasonably well if you spend more time editing on your DAW. More on this below

5. 1/4 inch or XLR cable

• Connects your instrument or mic to the interface. XLR’s for microphones and 1/4 inches for electric instruments.

AUDIO SETUP

Plug in the Audio Interface to the USB port of your computer. You may have to download a free driver for some interfaces. For this example, we’ll be using the inexpensive M Audio M-Track, whose driver can be found here.

Vocalists and acoustic instrumentalists will plug the ‘female’ end of your XLR (the one with three holes) into your mic and the other end into your interface. Electric instrumentalists can plug one end of their 1/4 inch to their instrument and the other to their interface. If you wish to capture the sound of your amp, set up your mic 6 inches away from the middle of it.

Vocalists and horn players can simulate soundproofing by singing/playing into a stack of towels or a few thick sweaters. You’re not looking for sharp studio quality here – you just want to capture your tone as cleanly as you can and minimize background noise.

AUDIO EDITING

I’ll be covering an extremely basic guide to EQ and compression here. In Lehman’s terms, compression makes your playing’s dynamics (loud vs quiet) more even and smooth while EQ cuts out or boosts certain frequencies.

For the sake of this tutorial, turning on the stock compressor on your DAW software will do just fine. You can find it under (plugins -> dynamics -> compressor).

Reference the EQ screenshots below for an idea of what frequencies to cut and boost depending on your instrument.
Leave your EQ totally flat (don’t touch it) if you’re playing piano.

Voice

Horns & Guitar

 Bass Guitar

 ​Click here for part 2 of this series to learn how to edit and sync video to your audio with speed.
 Stay tuned for part 3, where we compare the audio fidelity of cheap, mid-level, and premium recording setups.

The digitization of educational content is important, but there’s little that’s pedagogically innovative here. Digitization really just changes the knowledge delivery channel. Don’t get me wrong: this is transformational and liberating for populations that found traditional materials inaccessible, as the tremendous success of the Rumie project demonstrates. But with a focus on content, our industry misses a tremendous opportunity to swim with the tide of research in education that has completely upended the knowledge-focussed paradigm of the last thousand years. The revolution that Ryan Craig is talking about in College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education and the teaching that Cathy Davidson champions in The New Education is fundamentally about the triumph of skills – hard, soft, all kinds of skills – over knowledge.

Even Virtual Reality and Artifical Intelligence, front and center recently at @EdtechXEurope, @ReimagineEducation, @SXSWedu, and @GSV, is only pedagogically innovative to the extent that it’s built for personalized- and competency-based learning.  Most applications of VR and AI remain grounded in a pedagogy that emphasizes mastery of bodies of knowledge. Some are explicitly marketed as technology that promotes better scores on traditional knowledge-oriented exams. By their very nature, VR and AI in education are directed to learning or doing things that are well-defined by educational content creators. To be sure, they may be very effective tools to speed up the acquisition of knowledge, but they do little to contribute to an education that gets students to know when and how to use the knowledge and then actually do the things they are learning to do.

Look at the Tyton Partners Time for Class 2017  report. It’s an industry-leading report on the state of technology in higher education. Or that’s what it’s supposed to be. But it turns out to be a report on “use and perceptions of”… wait for it… “digital courseware”. The first bullet point in the report mentions “expanding options for “digital learning delivery”. Delivery. The rest of the report is heavily focussed on content delivery; the word “skills” doesn’t appear once. It’s important to understand the pace of adoption and satisfaction with digital courseware, but it’s only a preliminary part of what we now think of as a total learning experience.

Then turn to the Unizin consortium, linking the leading public higher education insitutions of the US Midwest. Unizin is supposedly pushing an ambitious agenda to “improve the learning experience with technology”. Yet its website’s “Solutions” area consists of “Content”, “Data Management”, and “For the Learning Environment”. I imagined that the latter would be about technology built to facilitate learning how to think and do, rather than learning as knowledge. But disappointingly, the link there is to “Course Material Delivery” and the words “Content” and “Deliver” appear twelve times in that short webpage.

And then consider TopHat’s attempt to ‘disrupt’ the publishing industry and Perusall’s platform that allows annotation of textbooks. Rather than innovating and leaving the 20^th century world of textbooks behind, these platforms buy into that out-of-date pedagogical model.

The examples are too numerous to catalog. Delivery of content still dominates the mainstream understanding of higher education.

We can look at Finland’s transformation of the pedagogy in its education system, in step with current research, and now being copied in China, to see where education is really heading. The Finnish system’s focus on phenomena-based learning, co-creation, and multidisciplinary problem-solving is where education is heading, there can be no doubt. This means that edtech must innovate to produce tools that facilitate this kind of learning.

Certainly, any tool that enables social and peer learning is going in the right direction. Eric Mazur, the Harvard Physicist who famously gave up on lectures, turned to peer instruction, and built the Learning Catalytics application to make it happen in traditional classrooms, is an example of someone whose pedagogy drove the creation of educational technology.

It might be surprising that putting technology to the service of deep learning of skills and competencies is natural in some of the most traditional subjects – Philosophy and English Literature. You would think that content would be king here, but in these subjects teachers have for a long time used techniques to develop students’ analytic, argumentation, and writing skills. That’s cleary demonstrated in the best book on teaching in higher ed, James Lang’s, Small Teaching; Lang is an English Professor.  And the UBC Centre for Teaching and Learning partnered with faculty from these departments to develop COMPair and Studiorium, tech tools that have nothing to do with ingesting content and everything to do with active learning of skills for persuasive, effective writing.

Counter-examples of this progress abound, unfortunately. The gamification of learning, with technology like Gradecraft, is mostly designed for content ingestion so that students perform better on traditional assessments – exams.  To be sure, deep gamification can lead to deep competency learning, as in this gamification of learning ultrasound techniques. But at present most of it is like the profusion of digital flashcards, built to help students succeed in the current, traditional  pedagogical environment. And who can blame those who build these tools and the parents and students who use them.  Tools for the gamification of fact-learning are squarely at the revenue end of the revenue-innovation trade-off.

One area that’s clearly underserved by edtech is the learning of hard and soft skills, both individual and interpersonal. For skills learning, we’re not even talking about innovative pedagogy. There’s no doubt that the only way to learn skills is to do them, over and over, reflecting each time, modifying techniques along the way, getting better along the way and learning what you’re capabable of doing.  We still have a system of apprenticeship for skilled trades that dates back thousands of years and relies on repeated practice and coaching. The pedagogy of apprenticeship is in fact more relevant in higher education than many realize, in fields from the creative and performing arts to health professions to business and law. So why aren’t we seeing edtech building more tools for learning of hands-on skills or skills that involve some kind of interpersonal interaction?

There are a few such tools. Learning technologies used for simulation-based education in the health professions and public safety are important, but they are very expensive and involve an on-site hardware installation, like the products offered by CAE Healthcare. Startups like GoReact, Practice.xyz, and WeVu.video are using the fact that video recording is now accessible to anyone to build tools for practice and feedback over time and space, including for the skilled trades.  We need more and better tools for collaborative, discovery-based skills learning, for educators to more easily put design thinking into practice at scale, and for real reflection and integration of learning like ePortfolios promised.

An educational model dominated by content delivery was a function of pre-digital, print technology. Technological innovation has given us a world where anything and everything can be digital, shared, and collaborative. How frustrating it will be if those building, buying, and using educational technology remain stuck in a pre-digital, pre-internet pedagogy and their technological innovation actually deepens the bias to a content-focussed model of education.

Save money, time, and resources, and train people better, by doing…

Salesperson Onboarding with Video Practice

What if there was a way to use video to cut down the cost of your time AND make sure video is really solving your problems and training your people to be great performers?

There is.  Here’s what you’d do:

1. Come up with the top ten sales objections encountered in your industry and with your products.
2. Prepare a rough script for each of these objections.
3. Find a team member who’s good at acting as a customer, making these objections.
4. Have that team member record those objections on his/her phone.
5. Upload these objections to a video sharing platform or a WeVu team site.
6. Then your new sales people can watch these at the right time and record themselves answering the objections.
7. Managers and even consultant coaches can watch these responses and provide feedback tied to particular moments in the video.
8. The new hire can review the comments and try again.

What’s great about this process is that no-one has to be in the same place at the same time to do it. It’s not video AS a meeting, it’s video to REPLACE meetings and training sessions.

With a two-way asynchronous (not in real time) video platform for discussion and practice, your team will learn and practice the skills they need when it’s convenient. Distributed teams can do this anywhere. Using WeVu to store and organize your team’s self-recorded video, you and other managers can really coach them. The magic of smartphone video is that you don’t have to be in the same place at the same time.