week 8

I thoroughly enjoyed our introduction to working with video in the classroom.  One insight that I gained into working with this medium is that the best way to learn it is by doing it.  Reading about how to record and edit video didn’t really capture what it was like to put together the video.  What I learned a lot about was how to work with someone creatively and how to mediate ideas and then make them real.  It was very cool!  I think it is a great way for students to not only learn the technology but also how to work together on a creative project.  There are some things that I would definitely alter when working with children though!  I would upload the video myself outside of class because I wouldn’t want the children sitting around with nothing to do!  Planning a lesson involving video would be difficult because of the time involved to do this.  My partner and I were focused on getting enough footage of a scene so that we were sure to have plenty to work with in the editing stage.  I didn’t think about the fact that it’s possible to have too much footage!  Our nine minutes of footage took almost 20 minutes to download.  Then our video imported as one big clip, so we had to keep going through the same footage to pull out the couple seconds that we really wanted.  It was pretty frustrating, but we both got pretty quick at cutting the video apart and piecing it together.  I think I would supervise the actual taping stage to be sure my students weren’t recording too much footage.  If possible, I would be sure that all my students’ videos would import as small clips.  I heard Michele say that it might have been certain cameras that were causing the video to import as one big clip.  So maybe that would mean even more planning to test each camera to be sure they were set up the same way.  I think video in the classroom has tremendous potential for teaching content and also social skills.  It will give shy students a chance to branch out and be seen and heard in a way which is not as intimidating as a formal oral presentation.  Creating their own video will make content more memorable and relatable.  As an introductory lesson I might have students conduct interviews with one another to get them used to being on camera.  I would have them work in groups of three so that each would have a chance to be the interviewer, interviewee and cameraperson.  As a more advanced lesson I would have students make a video science project.  This would give them the opportunity to create a video involving several different shots – the set-up, the actual performance of the experiment, and a re-cap explaining what happened and why.  A big potential problem would be that the project may require students to use the equipment outside of school.  A lot of instruction on the appropriate use of the equipment would be absolutely necessary.  It might be possible to set up times throughout the day when the students could perform their experiment in school…again it would be a planning/preparing issue.