Digital Video

Students in today's world are constantly being bombarded with audio visual information from TV, magazines, advertisements and of course, the internet.  When they get to school they don't want to turn all of this off.  The 'Google generation' (born after 1993) who are said to be the ones that will not hesitate to pick up a smart phone, tablet, laptop or jump on a computer and Google whatever question they were asked are the ones that we are teaching in our classrooms right now so why not take this into account when creating lessons and assessments for them.  Students are far more likely to engage in an assessment when they have the opportunity to go out, create and edit their own digital movie to present to their peers. 


"...video production in the classroom enables the development of media literacy, higher order thinking skills, project based learning experiences, real world relevancy experiences, and a deeper connection to the curriculum being explored. But while all this is essential, it represents only half of the potential of using video in the classroom.

The other half to all the skills and experiences being developed is the experience that students receive in communicating their own original ideas to others, and in listening to others communicate their ideas to them. It’s that speaking and listening thing." Nikos Theodosakis, 2002

This pretty well sums up the reasons to use videos within the classroom but I have also included the following analysis of digital videos within the classroom.

PLUS	MINUS	INTERESTING
·        Engaging ·        Encourage creativity ·        Great for use as a 'hook' ·        can make students feel emotions such as compassion, anger. ·        can challenge students current ideas / thoughts	·        inappropriate content easily found ·        time to construct videos can be long ·        software required ·        expensive equipment (although phone cameras make this better nowadays)	·        Students creativity ·        students at different skill levels on computer (editing)

For my arts assignment I needed to create a video.  I found this a lot of fun and not too challenging but I did spend many hours creating the presentation as I got distracted by making it look good.  The video is below.