Power of Video

I have been using video in my teaching for several years now. I found that video helped to demonstrate places that my students most likely would not be able to visit or relate to otherwise. As a Social Studies teacher, I would show entire videos from start to end along with a worksheet and vocabulary to learn throughout the video. I have also used video for my own learning in the past few years, for example I learned how to install a bathroom faucet on YouTube. Recently, my use of video has broaden from simply watching videos to interacting and creating with video.

Last school year, I experienced Skype in the Classroom. For the first time, I was able to connect my students educators in other parts of the world. We Mystery Skyped with other schools in Japan and California. A Mystery Skype is when the students do not know where the other class is located and the two classes play 20 questions to guess where the other class is. Definitely a lot of fun and worth trying out! I was also fortunate enough to provide my students with the opportunity to Skype with a School Counselor in Egypt. Video conferencing technology is just as useful in the classroom as it is in the corporate setting.

Last Summer, I took a Video in the Classroom course through Eduspire. The course provided me with a GoPro to use in my classroom and I have been hooked since. With all the harnesses, extensions and mounts, I can now video record anything, anywhere! I made a video from my dog's perspective using a dog harness, it was filmed at the local farmer's market with many dogs and kids saying hi. I have created screen casts to help educate my colleagues and students on how to use Google applications. For our school, I am also creating publicity videos that can be shared on social media to broadcast all the great things happening at SEMS this school year.

There are two ideas I want to share with you about using video in the classroom. The first is to always have a plan. When watching a video as a class provide students with what they are watching for and be prepared to discuss afterwards.Prepare students before a Skype session with roles and research about who they are Skyping, have questions prepared. When creating a video, have a storyboard and script, it will make filming much simpler and faster. Students also need to be taught how to plan for making a video, we show them how to outline and plan essays, we must do the same with storyboards and scripts for videos. The second idea is we need to keep videos short. The shorter a video is, the more impactful it will be on the audience. We no longer need to show full length films to our students, we can show clips of videos from various resources and have powerful collaborative discussions about them in place of worksheets. This will help our students with their digital literacy skills, that is their ability to discern information and bias from media.

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Links to videos I have made:

• Forms Screencast

• Makerspace

• PBIS

• Google Sites

• GoPro on my dog