This is my first video teaching task. I used Video Impression 2 which is an old video editor which came with my old digital camera. It works quite well, though, to make short videos. I have just purchased better video software for Windows and will try that out and I use iMovie on my school laptop. I wanted to start the year differently. My students know I will ask them about their holidays. They won’t know there will be a video introduction. The year 9s will have to learn the passé composé and the activities first and I have a slide presentation for that and then a doc with the key vocabulary which is also practised in this video. Video Impression makes it as an AVI file so it is not as clear on YouTube as the version I will run on my computer. Students then will have a copy of the video, the doc and the PowerPoint to consult. My senior students will use this as revision and they will go onto Twiducate which I use all the time with them to practise their French. They know what to do and their question will be – how long?
So I have a learning package – the video, the doc and the slide presentation. They can be used in any order according to student need. The students also have things which they can consult which covers the content I want them to know. They could just as easily make their own slide presentation or video as a response for homework and that is something I expect the senior students would be able to do. As a teacher I know how quickly I can slap a PowerPoint or a doc together. I do these things so I can tell the difference between hard work and the shortcut approach. I know when you ask students to make a video you have to give them time to muster images, sounds, play with timings and effects. It is a longer process but it is something they enjoy and it does allow them to ingest the content more slowly as they are doing it.
This is the beginning! I plan to work out more ways of delivering video teaching /learning to my students. I can tailor what I am doing to the class I have but it will also become a resource bank I can reuse and share. As I get better and have a programme which will manage the timings better I ought to be able to produce better and better materials. We’ll see.