Turn video into your teaching superpower

Mmhmm is one of the applications I have benefited most from after moving my classes and lectures online as a result of the pandemic restrictions. The company’s founder, Phil Libin, decided to launch the company after seeing how, when lockdown began, the daily round of videoconferencing became tedious in the extreme, and tried to make it a little more entertaining.

When I Heard about Mmhmm, I was immediately in tune with the idea: at the beginning of the pandemic, when I saw how most classes dragged on for 80 minutes, with a teacher crouching in a corner of the screen while a presentation rolled monotonously on, I started exporting my presentations to images so I could use them as virtual backgrounds in Zoom and other programs, as well as investing in a green chroma screen and some simple lighting to improve the result, allowing me to continue teaching under more reasonable conditions by improving communication and above all, making my classes more engaging.

When, in the middle of last year, I tried Mmhmm, I found it a breath of fresh air, allowing me to improve my online communication even more. My impression, after several months of use, is that what Phil did was not simply create a tool to make things more entertaining, but a way to redefine online video as a communication genre, providing it with many more possibilities that as well as being…