How the LDS Media Library App Can Bless Your Teaching

The LDS Media Library app can change how you use media in the classroom. Its easy-to-use features allow seminary and institute teachers to find, organize, and teach with media in a lesson. This allows teachers to focus on inviting the Spirit and reaching their students through a variety of methods.

Find

Brother John Vasas, a seminary teacher in Syracuse, Utah, has been using the app for about two years, and he has noticed the difference it makes in preparing and teaching lessons. “I use it almost every class period,” he said.

For Brother Vasas, one of the app’s most helpful tools has been its search feature, which allows you to quickly find the media that best supports your lesson. You can search by speaker, topic, or title, and the results can be filtered to show videos, images, or audio.

“The number of videos and their accessibility are just phenomenal,” said Brother Vasas. “I can do one search and get multiple videos that will inform, instruct, give definition, give application, and show how students can live [that principle] in their lives.”

Organize

Once you’ve found the videos, images, and audio you want to use to support your lesson, you can organize the media into playlists for each class, lesson, or subject.

“It’s really easy to organize and find the videos in the playlists,” said Sister Joan Merrell, an early-morning seminary teacher in Jackson City, Missouri. Sister Merrell has also used the app’s trimming feature to show short clips of longer videos in her lessons. “It took a little messing around,” she said, “but I think the app makes it easier so I can focus more on how I want to use [the media] in a lesson and less about the mechanics.”

You can also add presenter notes as you prepare your lessons, and future updates to the app will allow you to customize your playlists by adding your own images and slides with text.

Teach

Waiting for online videos to open and load can be frustrating or even impossible in classrooms with limited or no internet access, but with the Media Library app, videos added to playlists are automatically downloaded to your device so they are ready to show as soon as you need them.

“I can watch videos back to back, and it’s seamless,” said Brother Vasas. “Within two or three seconds, I’ve gone from one video to the next. And it’s downloaded, so I’m not buffering. I can watch a video as quick as I’d like.”

And if you’re signed into the app on multiple devices, your content will be available no matter which one you’re using.

Brother Steven Rose, an institute teacher in Taylorsville, Utah, has found that using the app allows greater freedom to show videos at appropriate times in his lessons. Instead of waiting to reach a certain presentation slide to open a video, he can use the clip whenever it fits naturally into the discussion. “As I’m working through the lesson, it’s so much quicker to go into the playlist and find the video when I need it,” he said.

Using media effectively can add a lot to your lessons and help your students connect on a deeper level with the principles you teach. “The youth in the Church are media driven,” Brother Vasas explained. “It engages them. In the New Testament this year, we can read the verses and then watch the Bible video, and it puts a picture to what we just read. It really pulls them in.” The app can help teachers work with media to engage and inspire their students.

The LDS Media Library app is available for Apple and Android devices. The app is currently available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, but additional languages and media will be added throughout the year. If you need more information or help getting started, detailed user guides are available for both Apple and Android devices.