WeVideo’s New Chief Education Officer Wants to Meet You

WeVideo was thrilled this month to announce that Dr. Nathan Lang has joined the company as our new Chief Education Officer. A former educator and administrator, and current author and popular speaker, Dr. Lang is a tireless advocate for helping schools tear down the legacy of classroom pedagogy in order to adopt methods that will fully prepare today’s students for tomorrow’s workplace.

You can read the press release about Dr. Lang’s hiring, here, but we wanted to go a step further and have him share with you, in his own words, what he hopes to accomplish as he guides WeVideo's education strategy and represents WeVideo within the education community. Here is what he had to say:

Most people who’ll read this know WeVideo as a great tool for bringing video to projects, which it is. But there is so much more to serving the needs of schools than just providing a great, fun tech product. Digital storytelling resonates. Everyone at every age has a story to tell and a perspective to share. I think it is important that education leaders have an opportunity to think about how to cultivate that universal urge to share stories in their districts and schools.

I’m looking forward to engaging education leaders, curriculum directors, superintendents and assistant superintendents. It is time to expand the conversation beyond the tool and really focus at a higher level on how we can collaborate to increase student learning. I’m excited to partner with these leaders to discuss how we can augment the standards for which teachers are creating learning targets in the classroom.

In fact, one of my biggest goals is to create an all-star personal learning network (PLN) to bring together those who want to make a difference in sparking student creativity, and encourage them to engage via social media to discuss learning success and how to use edtech to advance learning in the classroom. Chats like #LeadUpChat, an educational leadership PLN via Twitter, and #divergED, a Twitter chat focused on divergent thinking, are great ways to expand the conversations to include new voices.

Superintendents and school building leaders have so much to manage.  One example is the principal’s role of managing student behavior. We know that if students are engaged in learning that is fun and meaningful, they are more likely  to make positive choices in the classroom, which means they can learn and achieve at higher levels. There is also a lot of conversations about the shortcomings of traditional measurements of student success. I want to shift the conversation to how students not only learn using new tools, but how tools like WeVideo provide a more effective and innovative assessment of student learning. The assessment process itself should be a learning vehicle and I want to help facilitate that.

I’m excited to start learning from you, the WeVideo education community, and start having a genuine conversation about how we can make the most of the opportunities before us.