Reflection Three, Week Four

This week we looked a podcasts, videos and images as education tools.

I had never worked with any of these mediums, so I decided to play around with video tool. My two original ideas were somehow drawing up how parliament works- to explain who is who with lots of pictures. I decided that due to time constraints, this would be too hard. I then started thinking along the line of sequencing in a children's book.

We are currently exploring in Literacy activities that you should be conducting before, during and after reading literature to your students. One of the activities we discussed was sequencing- putting the key parts of the story into order.

I decided that I would take ACELT1580, ACELY1654 and ACELY1647 of the Foundation Literacy General Capabilities on board and recreate the Monday- Saturday part of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" (due to time constraints I was only able to do this part of the book, however with more time I would have done from cover to cover).

I decided to use "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" due to the number of different images that was required. With a class of 25+ students, each would need to have a role. A few students (4-5) could type up the words and insert the pictures; 15 students could colour-in the foods; and 1-6 students could do the narration. A total of 22 pictures were used, which is almost enough to cover a class of 25 each holding up a picture.

 Examples of the pictures used.

I am very lucky in that I have access to two prep students in my immediate family, and quite a few within the extended family. This video was made with 4 children- 3 in prep and the voice over done by a niece in year 2 and my son who is in prep. The pictures were coloured in by 2 prep students. The words and pictures were done by myself, however with supervision and assistance, this task could have been completed by prep students.

I was very careful when taking the photos to not include their faces. As this video would be made available on the internet, I did not want to compromise the safety of the participants. If this were my prep class, I would have done the same thing and movie night viewing. This is where students could point themselves out the their parents.

The photos were taken using a camera as the quality of them was high. They were then uploaded into Movie Maker. I chose Movie Maker as it was free and very easy to use. I was able to make the movie by uploading the pictures onto the main screen of the program. If I was happy with the default settings, the movie would have been complete within approximately 10mins of uploading the photos.

I customised the amount of time each photo stayed on the screen for. This was a very easy process using a drop-down menu. The default was set at seven seconds, which I felt was too long. Three seconds seemed to last well, and gave our narrators long enough time to read and verbalise the words on the screen.

There are a number of different options that you could include in the movie such as which way you want the next image to appear from, inserting captions and titles, changing the visual effects etc, however this movie was not designed for such.

The next task was to create the narration. This took a few practices to complete, however with three clicks, you had sound. The quality of the sound is good. Once you are happy with it, the main screen shows you the visual and audio components together like this:

Once happy with the movie, you are given a number of options for saving the movie dependent on the viewing format. I chose one that would keep the size of the movie relatively low.

This is the final product (please note that they are a little loud on the credits screen...):

I was very happy with the final product and I could see myself using video in a number of ways in the classroom.

I was assisting a student last night with their math homework when we came to a problem of dividing two fractions. I vaguely remembered that something had to be inverted. We used google and found a site that showed a few different ways to explain how to do the problem including a complicated diagram and a video. Using a program like Movie Maker, I could develop quick movies that explain to students step by step how to solve maths problems like this. It would take less than an hour to do and would provide additional support to students outside of school hours rather than trying to rely on parental help, and encouraging independence. You could also use this task as a student driven one to confirm learning by asking the students to make a one minute to explain math problems in a way that is clear to them.

I would also use Movie Maker to recreate books/events/poetry etc for parent nights. I believe that these sorts of lessons help to engage a higher number of students and additionally provide fantastic examples for parents so that they see what their children are up to. It also opens up an avenue of creativity that may not have been possible before (redefinition within the SAMR model).

There are so many ways that videos could be incorporated in teaching today. It does open up another possible avenue of engagement for all students and can be used to demonstrate different abilities such as leadership through organising the project, artistic capabilities both through the physical and digital aspects, and teamwork with all students pulling together to complete the task.

As with all tasks involving photos, images and the like, careful consideration needs to be taken of where this is going to be viewed at a later date. If any of the movies had the students faces in them, I would be careful about the distribution of this. I would ensure that I had written permission from the parents to use their images, and would keep screening to within the classroom and to the teachers. I would prefer to design tasks that made the images unidentifiable (as per the movie I have made) which I believe still looks good and suits the purpose it was designed for.

This is a very easy medium to use and I look forward to incorporating it into my lessons.