In October 2021 I decided to have a first attempt at making a YouTube screencast tutorial to help DP Computer Science students create Graphical User Interfaces in Java. Since then, I recently created a second tutorial video this month in August 2022 to help my new DP Physics students create Graphs using Logger Pro.

DP Computer Science: How To Create GUIs in Java

DP Physics: How To Create Graphs Using Logger Pro

Now that I’ve made a couple of tutorial videos, I thought I’d share my process to help others too.

How to Create YouTube Tutorials with your MacBook

Suprisingly not too challenging, using my school provided MacBook Air and the QuickTime Player software already built-in to macOS, I was able to create a fairly quick and easy to produce tutorial to support my students. A great video tutorial on how to do this on macOS can be found here. The tutorial also shows how to do picture-in-picture if you want to show your face while doing your screen recording.

What to do if you make a mistake during recording? Don’t Panic!

One really important caveat to share, especially if you make a mistake in the middle of your 15-minute recording (or mulitple times like me), is that you can trim and crop your screencast videos as needed. A great tutorial of how to do this can be found here.

How Long Does It Take to Create a Video?

Each video is about 15-20 minutes in length, and uses some very simple tools to make them. I would say from start-to-finish each tutorial video took about 1-hour to make, edit, and post to YouTube - not bad for something that you can use again and again each year!

What’s next?

• Use GoodNotes to create iPad handwritten tutorials
• Experiment with Picture-in-Picture tutorials: could be useful, or terrifying
• How to calculate and propagate uncertainty in DP Physics from start to finish
• How to use Vernier Logger Pro video analysis tool for projectile motion
• How to solve DP Physics Paper 1, Paper 2, and Paper 3 exam-style questions

That’s all for now.

All the best,

Mike