My Voyage with Video

My personal technology goal for the current school year was mess around with digital video. I had no experience with it and no real idea of how I might use it, but after having a year of success with audio, I thought I would give it a try. My wife helped out immensely by giving me a Flip for my birthday.

Here are the video experiments to date which have produced something worthwhile:

YouTube for Shakespeare - Actually, before I began shooting original video, I stumbled onto some Shakespeare scenes on YouTube. I realized at once that I'd overlooked a source of enrichment for my students. I posted them online as a course resource, and in one case selected four different versions of the "To be or not to be speech" by Hamlet and assigned students to compare/contrast the portrayals.

Vanity Reigneth - I turned the Flip on myself in order to produce some blogs. The production values were dreadful, but this has motivated me to learn some basic editing with iMovie in the near future. More importantly, I learned about working with those memory hogs-- video files. After struggling some with posting files to my web site, I came to appreciate the ease of uploading to YouTube and Google Video and the advantages of embedding, etc. My "Palin Panic" vlog also served as a model for my AP Am. Government class (see below).

Tutorials - Thanks to Will Richardson I've discovered the tutorials offered in YouTube for many applications.

AP Gov't Vlogs - Six of my AP students have vlogged on political issues ranging from the election campaigns to the auto bailout. This has provoked great discussion in class, but has not been efficient or smooth since each time the student has borrowed my camera and I have posted. I would love feedback and suggestions on a better process.

What up docs? My most gratifying experience has been the interaction of google docs with YouTube and Google Video. I have enjoyed the ease with which I have been able to insert video into google doc presentation. Rather than projecting these slide shows, I have published them for individual use. In some cases they have been posted to Wikis. More recently, I have published them directly to Moodle. My favorite to date is a video quiz on residential roles created with YouTube clips: http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dgnbw4hh_65j8n7jddf . After the students have taken this quiz individually, I can project it like a Power Point for class discussion. The ease of posting these presentations also make them useful for make up work.

I've only just scratched the surface this semester and would love to learn what other folks are doing.