An Educator's TikTok Adventure

I have a TikTok account tiktok.com/@jasonleekiatseng. There are 100 videos, in which I talk about my thoughts and experience in the tuition industry.

HOW I STARTED

How I started was just to experiment on how I can reach out to a different audience - tutors who prefer to watch me talk than to read my writings. I must admit that it felt a bit scarier posting on TikTok than on FB, because on FB I'm more or less writing to people I know, while on TikTok, it was a whole new world altogether, and I have no idea who will watch my videos and how they will react.

DIFFERENT SKILLSETS

Writing and recording myself talking for under 3 minutes require different skill sets, but more or less the same source, which is what is in my head. Recording myself felt unnatural at first - I couldn't stand how I sounded and looked - but after a while, I just focused on brainstorming the content, and these worries bugged me no more.

BENEFITS

One benefit of recording myself regularly is gaining the confidence to appear in front of the camera. With 5G / 6G, Web 3.0, and Metaverse coming our way, videos are becoming more and more ubiquitous as a media for communication. I feel that I'm training myself to be confident to appear on camera to record a promotional video, or to record a lesson.

FINDING MY WAY

One thing I'm glad that I did, was to record myself walking and talking, instead of singing and dancing. I am not a funny guy and I cannot sing or dance to save my life. So I thought, why not just use TikTok to record short sharing of ideas, like how I'd share my ideas if I'm going on a morning walk with a fellow tutor? That format felt quite effortless to me, and it fits my schedule, so I was able to keep at it. It's true that every change requires effort and stepping out of our comfort zone, but finding a way that felt more natural for us, allows us to keep doing it.

GIVE IT A TRY

I'd encourage other educators to use TikTok to start recording their thoughts, experiences, messages, and even simple tips to their students or other audience.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Thanks to Imran Tahir for convincing me to start recording my first TikTok video. I'm still looking to him (tiktok.com/@justoneidea) for inspiration to keep going.

Thanks to Han Kok Kwang 韩国光, Global Certification Master for running the 5 Days No Job No Sweat Challenge. It got me to record daily live videos even when I was on a trip overseas.