Digital Video.

Technical Aspects

·         What can this technology do?

o   Digital Videos:

§  Accurately record events

§  Available on almost every smart phone

§  Easily edited

§  Create personalised videos

§  Combine images with audio

§  Present large amounts of information in short period of time.

§  Bring real life examples into the classroom, via video

·         What do the settings of the technology allow you to do?

o   Movie Maker

§  Create webcam videos

§  Record a narrative

§  Add soundtrack

§  Embed videos

§  Upload images and videos

§  Add captions

§  Format images and video

§  Trim videos

§  Add basic animates and special effects.

·         Can you multi-author, do you have privacy settings?

o   Movie Maker

§  No in-built privacy settings

§  One author at a time

·         Could easily be used with group work

·         Can you customise the tool or space?

o   Depending on the software you can

§  Add title page

§  Edit text

§  Slide appearance

§  Fade in/out transitions

§  Add animations

§  Special effects

§  Add filters

·         What other technical considerations are important? Is it easy to use? What experience is needed to operate it?

o  This so far was the most frustrating digital tool I have attempted to use yet. Mostly because of the sheer amount of options. Once I had mastered the basic record and trim functions then I wanted to do fancier and fancier things. Movie maker was fairly straight forward to use however some elements of its editing are counter intuitive. I ended up trimming everything except the parts I wanted to keep.

What took me the most time with this task was working out how and what format to upload the video.  I would have to do a fair bit of research on this before being comfortable using videos confidently in a teaching setting. In the end I had to upload the video to youtube and then embed it into the blog post before I could get it to work. I looked up technical support for blogs and found that videos over 5MB are a problem, this is a limitation on how and where videos could be used. 

Learning outcomes

·         Targets visual and aural learners

·         Used to promote public speaking and confidence

·         Groupwork

·         When students create their own videos the following topics could be introduced across the curriculum

o   Digital Ethics

o   Copyright

o    Technological skills

o   Cyber safety

o   Digital footprint

·         Can be used to support higher order thinking through explanation and creation

Supported activities

·         Distance education

·         Absent participation

·         Digital homework submission

·         Alternative form of assessment for learners who struggle with writing

·         Engaging way to present a lot of information

Substitution: A video of a powerpoint presentation with lots of text. This is no different than standing up in front of the class either reading from a text book or from a powerpoint.

Augmentation: Using videos to explain and demonstrate real life applications of maths problems. (this could actually be a lot of fun, and would be a great idea for a web series)

Modification: Students answer homework questions posed on flipgrid. Allows students to use video but there isn’t the option to customise the video.

Redefinition: Instead of maths homework, students are required to submit a video in any form they wish that explains how they arrived at their final answer to a question. The great thing about this is that if all the videos were shared among the class, some students might understand the concept better when explained by their peers.

Suggested implementation:

One of the biggest challenges I foresee as a maths teacher especially in the higher grades is using homework to assess students understanding of a concept. These days with great programs such as Wolfram Alpha it’s easy to find the answers to complex maths problems (that calculators don’t solve for you) while having no understanding of them.  Instead of giving students a THOUSAND maths problems to do as homework I feel it would be more effective to require them to submit a homework video explaining how they came to their final answer.  An example of which is uploaded here or embedded below.