Saturday, March 30, 2013

Chapter 9 - Creating & Sharing Information with Multimedia



Focus Question: How can teacher use video resources in their teaching?

Videos and DVD's are widely used teaching tools that, when well made, convey important information in academically interesting, visually engaging ways. Videos can sometimes be viewed as a passive experience unless teacher create opportunities for students to engage. For example, the teacher may present a video and ask for the students to write down ten facts they thought were interesting. Or the teacher may ask that the students answer questions that are provided to them before playing the video.


There are many methods that can be used to transform videos from a passive form of learning to a highly interactive form. I am a strong believer in videos and I believe that videos are one of the best ways to portray a message to any audience, whether it be adolescent students or senior citizens. Having a strong like for videos makes it hard for me to sit through a class without at least one video being shown. It can be a brief video, but I feel that it will always get the attention of your class. If you don't believe me, just try it! Teachers don't even have to announce that they are going to play a video. I find it more exciting if the teacher doesn't mention a word about the video and just start playing it out of the blue. Students love it!

I had a teacher in high school, who I think jump started my pro-video belief. We had at least one video in class daily and we all seemed to learn more from this two-minute video than we would have reading a section of our book in thirty minutes. This doesn't mean that we didn't have any book work. We would have tons of book work, but when class started she would play a video of the topic we would be going over in the lecture. This gave all the students a grasp of what we would be learning so we wouldn't be clueless at the beginning of the lecture.


Tech Tool Link: Teacher Tube

I really enjoyed this website. There are videos that teachers can search that can help them get a point across to students are to just brief them over the current subject they're learning. This video can also give ideas to teachers as to how to relate the current subject to their daily activities so the students may become a bit more familiar and comfortable with the subject.

Summary & Conclusion:

I am aware that there are teachers out there who abhor videos in the classroom, but they must remember that we are living in a new generation now. There are things that have changed and these changes are out of their control no matter how hard they try to oppress it in their classroom. So maybe give the students some work throughout the video. Give them some question to answer to make sure they're paying attention or maybe an essay briefing the video. There are many things that teachers can assign to make this a not-so-passive form of learning. I believe that every teacher should be using these new advances in technology to their advantage and what a better way than to show these students what they are learning in your classroom.

Resources:

Maloy, R. W., Verock-O, R. E., Edwards, S. A., & Woolf, B. P. (2010). Transforming learning with new technologies. Allyn & Bacon. 

1 comment:

  1. Video is an important learning tool these days and as you mention they are abundant so why not use them!:) The other thing about video that is widely popular and worth considering is to allow students to create their own videos to interact with content and to demonstrate learning - it is great! It is definitely more time-consuming, but students also learn about editing and planning (storyboarding) as well as deadlines - all 21st century skills!

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