Group 2 Tools: Digital Video
The incorporation of digital video in the classroom not only helps students engage more deeply with the subject matter but it allows them to recall the information they've learned for longer.
I have focused primarily on YouTube as a digital video tool in the classroom. YouTube is a video sharing website that allows users to upload, view, and share videos, and it makes use of Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media video. Available content includes video clips, TV clips, music videos, and amateur content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.
YouTube has new features available with the new version and versions coming soon including:
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10 Characteristics of a “YouTube’d” Classroom
1. Passive Consumption
Passive consumption is important to YouTube’s success. Being digital— via the Google-based search engine, YouTube puts more media in your lap than you could ever hope to consume. Here, users’ roles are simple: surf the channel, and enjoy the show.
Possibility for Teachers: Make processes and procedure as simple and transparent as possible. This is not to suggest that instruction should occur below a learner’s Zone of Proximal Development, but rather that often procedural knowledge and murky processes can cloud what’s most important in a lesson. While an absolutely backwards idea in the learning process, passivity works wonders for digital media consumption. In the classroom, during critical input experiences keep processes and procedure free from “debris,” learner-centered, and content-focused.
2. Active Selection
While largely passive, there is opportunity on YouTube for active participation, including forming video responses or video annotation. This seems to counter the idea of passivity, but the role of interaction here is limited in intensity and duration.
Possibility for Teachers: Model decision-making with learners. Give them “voice and choice,” and hold them accountable for the power and responsibility that comes with choice.
3. Assisted Discovery
“Suggested Videos” change everything. Imagine every time you read a poem, based on some prescient mathematical algorithm another poem—similar in content, structure, or some other important way—materialized before your eyes, functioning as a kind of socially-suggested anthology. Game changing!
Possibility for Teachers: consider thematic instruction, where learning is anchored by a theme (“What is Design?”), rather than a handful of standards, the end-of-the-unit assessment, or worse, simply a genre.
4. Interdependence
Google-owned YouTube is friendly with twitter, Facebook, Google+, blogging, and all forms of electronic media. This kind of seamless integration allows an impressive convergence with all other “internet parts.” Genius.
Possibility for teachers: Consider interdependence of the entire school and/or district at every opportunity: how might the school improvement plan “talk” to standards-based grading in your classroom? How can the school website support communication with parents? Think of linking as much as possible. Also try cross-content units (e.g., merging Social Students with English as you study the relationship between Literature and Revolution)
5. Diversity
There is a huge diversity of content on YouTube—from informal, user-made coverage of important social events to informative, educational or entertaining content
Possibility for Teachers: Consider “mashing” content that might not suggest such mashing. The concept is sound: for students accustomed to extraordinary and often inane diversity, mimicking that strategically in the classroom can spark new ways of seeing old content.
6. Brevity
While there are feature-length films available, the sweet spot of YouTube lies in quick bursts of videos that allow users to continue self-actuating their own experience.
Possibility for Teachers: Move to persistent, streaming “lessons.” Leverage the mini-lesson. Use project and mini-projects. Encourage intellectual stamina and endurance not through duration, but anchoring themes and projects that persist.
7. Selective Social Interaction
There are plenty of ways YouTube users can socially interact, but compared to other electronic media platforms, the YouTube experience can be as anonymous or transparent as the user defines.
Possibility for Teachers: Offer choices to publish work consistently, but not simply for the sake of publishing because it sounds “21st century.” Rather, allow students to understand the nuts and bolts of publishing. Why publish? To which audience? Through which media form? Distributed through which media channel? And most importantly, why? Offer optional group work with authentic reasons for collaboration—and opportunities for learners to move between class members and groups based on their expertise, interest, etc. Self-paced. Self-selected.
8. Non-traditional
In a thumbing of the nose to the status quo, YouTube is a haven for whimsical, non-traditional content.
Possibility for Teachers: As with YouTube, when the content is king and haughty formality is secondary, users feel empowered to engage. Give them what they need, and get out of their way even when you may not see the immediate “rigor” of an idea.
9. Humor
People like to laugh, and YouTube makes discovering, sharing, and commenting on funny videos simple.
Possibility for Teachers: We are quickly becoming a media-centered society. Across all content areas—especially those that don’t seem to suggest it—work in media forms that are funny, satiric, ironic, or self-effacing (students love that). Below is a video to promote teamwork
10. Cultural Hyperbole
When you’ve got billions of videos, it should be no surprise that YouTube benefits from both diverse and spectacular content. It is the extreme that catches our eye, whether by topic (e.g., violence, humor, romance), or the context (e.g., watching a video with 500,000,000+ views). uts, and secrets of your curriculum. Where is there spectacle? What would be interesting to laypersons? What is often misunderstood? Think Mythbusters.
Conclusion
There can be a case made to keep your class as far away from YouTube as possible. It’s a cesspool of the non-academic, inane, immature, overly-brief cultural reflections. Keep in mind though that you’re not going to change that—or learner’s opinions of it—by ignoring it. It’s simply a (possibly circus) mirror for society. If you want to challenge YouTube, do so with high-levels of learning that promote self-awareness, meaningful collaboration, and cognitive growth.
SAMR Model Digital video in the classroom
Redefinition
Technology allows for creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable
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A classroom is asked to create a documentary video answering a focus question and uploading it to YouTube.
Students learn content and skills in support of important concepts as they pursue the challenge of creating a professional quality video.
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Modification
Technology allows for significant task redesign
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Student tasks, assessments or information may be presented in YouTube videos.
Students are asked to use still images or clips to make their own movie using YouTube Video editor
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Augmentation
Technology acts as a direct tool substitute, with functional improvement.
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Digital videos are incorporated into the overall design of student work, allowing for curriculum links with using ICTs
Students access YouTube videos as a means of practically learning methods or processes through viewing tutorials.
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Substitution
Technology acts as a direct tool substitute, with no functional change.
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Text books and other such reference material give way to sources such as YouTube, with resources available which are almost inexhaustible.
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