Dresden. The announcement was tough: “How one method will change learning forever!” was the title of the Youtube star “Lehrerschmidt” for the lecture he gave on Thursday evening at the SRH Oberschule in Dresden. Specifically, it was about learning with the help of videos and thus the speaker’s specialty.
Lehrerschmidt is called Kai Schmidt offline and is the headmaster by profession. The 40-year-old comes from Lower Saxony. Five years ago he started recording the first learning videos and uploading them to the school server. They were initially only intended for his own students to help them with their homework. Previously, he hadn’t found the videos he was looking for online. The idea and the way it was implemented paid off – long before Corona.
The first videos were horribly amateurish, as he says. With a cell phone in one hand and a pen in the other. Soon the recordings got better and the amount of data too big for the school server. “Do Youtube”, advised his students. In his mind, the portal was still full of cat videos at the time.
Schmidt has now published more than 1,500 learning videos on YouTube. At first he couldn’t really explain his success to himself, he says. “Who voluntarily watches math videos?”
His channel is now followed by over a million people, a number that has doubled in the past year. The months of homeschooling during the pandemic brought him tremendous popularity.
At the school festival of the still quite young SRH-Oberschule, at which the first graduates of the 10th grade are bidding farewell at the same time, the appearance of Lehrerschmidt was the undisputed highlight. Each of the students knows him and his videos. Teachers, too, have long enjoyed working with this special form of deepening learning content in an entertaining way.
“Help, my child wants to become an influencer!”
The event was financed to 90 percent from funds from the state capital Dresden. Many students and their parents came to the performance at 6 p.m. in the schoolyard.
Schmidt spoke about the advantages and disadvantages that increasing digitization brings with it for learning and teaching. After five years as a Youtuber, he has already experienced plenty of success stories, but also misunderstandings.
Among other things, Schmidt went into the creation and correct use of learning videos and spoke about the methodology of the so-called flipped classroom, in which learning content is worked out alone at home and then applied together in class.
With his second lecture “Help, my child wants to become an influencer!” Schmidt finally reassured the parents, who are increasingly concerned about their children’s new career aspirations. If you want to be a successful influencer, you have to do a lot for it, emphasized Schmidt. However, he himself never wanted to give up a job as a teacher for his YouTube career.
A listener in Dresden asks: “How do your students think that you are so famous?” Lehrerschmidt’s answer: “Nobody at my school cares.”
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