What Do You See?

So we have week four coming and now going!

This week I decided to research and create a video. This presented many challenges. One being I thought I did not have enough time to be able to create a video in 2 days - and in our lecture we were told about Photostory...it is brilliant! You can download it from here for free http://microsoft-photo-story.en.softonic.com/ - yes free! It was so user friendly and exactly what a teacher wants for their students; something that is simple to use and will produce great results. It turns out, I didn't need two days to have to make this video - the most time consuming part was cooking (which wasn't that bad because it is one of my greatest pleasures). On the other hand if it is that simple and easy to use students could not spend as much time creating their 'master piece' and 'rush job' it. 

This has great potential in a classroom: 

• It can be used as an assessment piece - create a video that follows procedure or a day in the life of...
• It can be used as a photo journal
• It can show the elements of story boarding and then the creation of their ideas

The creating and developing of a video develops a students metacognitive and higher order thinking. Their communication and presentation, technology literacy, organisational, teamwork and movie-making skills will all be developed (Birt, 2013).

Developing this higher order thinking skills comes about because the students are having to have knowledge, apply this knowledge, analyse, synthesis/create and eventually be able to reflect and evaluate on the process they have just taken place in. The evaluating process can take place on their blog or in their workbooks, even a  verbal class evaluation could take place. Creating a video for an assessment is a valuable one to give, it is also diverse enough to engage students. However it will need to have very strict guidelines to ensure that students do not get distracted but follow the outcomes that they are required to make. The learning outcomes would need to be tight and specific and the student's work would need to be routinely checked to make sure they are heading in the right direction. I don't think you can just say 'Yea, you can make a video.' unless you are absolutely sure it could work. But given the right time and place I think it could work absolute wonders and be one of those assessments you remember.

Being a teacher, if we were to create a video of the year that was, for example, we would need parents permission to include their child and their artwork before assuming that we can. Any other pictures that we include would be best to be acknowledged. Teachers would also have to be wise with who they show the video to and just give it to anyone.

This video that I have created could be a student’s result of an assignment. The assignment could be ‘Create a Meal for Two’, ‘Follow a procedure’ or several other things.  A video has potential in both English and Home Economics classes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6Mmb6xOCIg

I ran into a lot of difficulty uploading this movie straight into my blog and it took 1/10 of the time uploading it to YouTube then linking it, so that is what I have done. I do not know why it would not upload, I even tried uploading it to my Wiki.I will have to work through it myself before I get my students to do it and they either all stress or all can do it. Otherwise the submission could be via USB or some other manual way.