Making Sense of Biology

A digital update from scientific YouTuber Mr Exham.

Once you get over the initial embarrassment of seeing yourself online, being an education YouTuber is a thoroughly rewarding experience. I can be going about my daily life as a teacher and get a notification of a comment on one of my videos.

It’s a thrill to be able to impact students all over the world as well as the ones directly in front of me in the classroom, or more recently of course, on Zoom. One simple video can be seen by so many students for years to come.

I have received thankful emails from homeschooling parents, fellow Biology teachers, students with long term absences due to illness and each time it gives me the incentive to keep making more videos.

I uploaded my first video back in 2013 and now have almost 150 videos on the channel covering the entirity of IGCSE Biology and a good proportion of A level.

Understandably, when lockdown started and schools closed, I saw a huge spike in my channel as teachers set my videos to be watched as part of their remote learning tasks. I have had over 300,000 views in this time, more than double what I had in the same period last year.

During lockdown my videos have been watched by people in over 130 different countries around the world and my subscriber count has shot up to over 13,000 people and 1.2 Million total views. 

Watch my most popular videos from during lockdown:

Over the last year in my role as Head of Digital Learning, I have made a lot of videos to help train teaching staff in the latest technology applications for education. These had been shared just amongst my colleagues internally but given my positive experience of putting my Biology content in the public domain, I have now launched a second YouTube channel, Mr Exham’s EdTech to help provide free training resources for teachers during this remote period and beyond. It has been great to hear that a few of our feeder prep schools have been using these videos to help with teacher training.

As more and more teachers have now started to create their own video resources and become comfortable in front of the camera, I would expect a real increase in high-quality educational content on the platform.

Visit Mr Exham's Youtube Channel.