I must admit that the materials this week overwhelmed me and I was unsure if I was going to have enough time to complete the work and present my blog post. While images, audio and video are not new concepts to me, the notion of actually creating these seemed unachievable. I chose to more thoroughly investigate videos for this week’s task as I am very interested in how they can be used in the classroom to not only reflect higher order thinking but how they can improve engagement of the students with the activity. Videos are not new to the classroom; in fact, I can remember when I was at high school, a TV on a stand would be wheeled to the front of the room and a cheesy, overacted educational clip would play. It was merely being used as a substitute for the teacher delivering the content themselves. After exploring a variety of video creation and sharing tools this week, I can see that video is now able to be used in a transformative way which really does target the synthesis and evaluation levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy.
I spent time on three video creators this week – Flipgrid, Powtoon and the YouTube video editing pages. I am going to provide an overview of both Flipgrid and the YouTube video editing tools as I see a lot of learning potential with both of these. Flipgrid Flipgrid enables a teacher to create a ‘grid’ and then to add topics to the grid. By using a unique grid code or topic code, students are able to access the grid and/or topic and post a video in response. Flipgrid can be easily used on any device (I used it on both my laptop and my mobile phone) and use of its basic functions are free. From a teacher’s perspective, the interface is extremely user friendly. When setting up the grid, there are a variety of options for teachers to select which allow customization of privacy settings and notification settings.
These settings would be helpful in ensuring the student’s safety on the internet while the moderation of responses option would allow the teacher to vet any new videos for inappropriate material. The dashboard page provides the teacher with a quick snapshot of student engagement with the grid which would be helpful in ensuring all students are participating. The free version of Flipgrid could be used very effectively in the classroom, but for an annual fee, there are some fantastic tools that are unlocked. Once the teacher has set up their portion, students are able to record a video on any device and upload it as a response to the topic. I set up the page using my laptop but recorded my response video on my phone. It was exceptionally simple to download the app, enter the unique code and then record my video. The short video time (90 seconds for the free version) would encourage students to be succinct in their answers and to order their thoughts and ideas logically. Students can review their video before they post it and can re-record easily if need be. Students can also access the topic and watch other videos that have been submitted. One of the main issues I see with this type of tool is copyright and how students appropriately reference ideas or quotes. There doesn’t seem to be any way of attaching notes to an uploaded video and a 90 second video doesn’t allow enough time for the addition of a verbal reference. With the ability to password protect the page and also for the teacher to moderate submissions, I am quite confident that the students could use this tool quite safely and ethically. The link to my Flipgrid is below:
YouTube Video Editing
I also spend some time investigating how to use the YouTube video editing tools. To begin, I recorded a video on my mobile phone. It would also be possible to record using the webcam of a laptop or a tablet device. I encountered some issues transferring the video from my phone to my laptop. Initially the video was too large to email so I compressed the video hoping this would fix the issue. Again, it was still too large to email. At this point, I realized that I had the YouTube app on my phone so could upload directly to YouTube using this. This worked perfectly and then when I accessed my YouTube account on my laptop, the videos were there. Depending on the type of devices being used to record the video, this uploading issue would definitely need consideration for a classroom situation. I found this editor quite simple to navigate around. It has an Audio Library page which contains a huge amount of free music and sound effects. Some of the audio tracks require a statement referencing the author in the video description and some don’t. This tool would be very helpful for students so they could ensure that they weren’t infringing on copyright while they were creating their video. I was able to add an audio track to play over the top of my video as well as adding text and a still photo. Initially, I couldn’t work out how to make my ‘Week 4’ text disappear after a certain amount of time. After some trial and error, I found the ‘split clip here’ tool which enabled me to make a break in the video and delete the text from a certain point. This tool would be very useful for cutting together content from different videos. The Editor also allows you to add filters, adjust the brightness and also add slow motion to your video. Once I had finished editing, I created the video and it was published to my channel. I was then able to easily embed my newly edited video into my blog.
I’m sure that there are other video editor programs available that have more functions and abilities, but I found the YouTube editor to be easy to learn, easy to navigate and I was happy with the overall quality of the video. There are however, some issues that I see with using the YouTube video editor. One is that to use it you must sign in with an email address. If every student signed in with their own email address, it would be impossible for the teacher to ensure their online safety. One possibility would be to have a class Gmail account and a class logon which all students would use. This way the teacher could monitor the videos being edited and also ensure that the settings are set to private to protect the students from unwanted outside commentary. As a teacher, I would also be concerned that instead of working on their videos, students were looking up and watching inappropriate YouTube videos. That behavior would be difficult to monitor and is a safety and ethical concern for the teacher to consider.
As I have previously discussed, learning activities which link closely with Productive Pedagogical principals will ensure that students are engaged and learning outcomes are achieved. (Reflection 2.2) It has been noted that “the creative challenge of using moving images and sound to communicate a topic is indeed engaging and insightful, … it also enables students to acquire a range of transferable skills …these include research skills, collaborative working, problem solving, technology and organization skills." (Bijnens, 2006) When considering both Bloom’s Taxonomy and the SAMR Model, videos could be used in the following ways:
In conclusion, I have found that videos can be used in a highly effective manner in the classroom. The various video creation tools available ensure that the technology is not only accessible and easy to use, but relevant and effective in the classroom. REFERENCES
2 Comments
Naomi Birmingham
13/4/2017 02:53:47 pm
Hi Carly
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Kris Atkinson
19/4/2017 03:33:50 pm
Hi Carly
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AuthorMy name is Carly. I'm currently studying a Graduate Diploma of Learning and Teaching (Secondary) through Central Queensland University. ArchivesCategories |