Posts tagged video

My Students’ Social Science Video

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2 years ago
by Seth in ,

This video is the fruit of a long project my 4th year students have been working on this year. The video is called: “A vision of Italian Students today -  Our Thoughts.”

The video was entirely produced by my students. We posted this as a reply to Prof. Mike Wesch’s video “A Vision Of Students Today,” which you can see at the bottom of this post.

Prof. Wesch’s video discusses the old-fashioned methods many teachers still use in class. If you are an educator and you haven’t seen it yet, you really should. My students have explored the same theme in this video.

Everything you see in this video was written, organised, filmed and publicised (at our school) by the students of our class. This includes the writing of questions, posting them to an online survey host. The statistics quoted in the second part of the video are based on the online questionnaire written entirely by the class. We then turned all the data into the script for our video. Oh, and English is our second language too!

Seeing as the results of our survey showed that by far the most popular means of communication in the school is via SMS, we did an experiment and organised the creation of our Flash Cards via SMS. This is why you’ll see some of the flash cards more than once!

The whole school was invited to reply to our survey, which asked what our schoolmates attitudes are to the Italian education system. I think you’ll agree, the results are surprising in more ways than one.

Here’s the (fantastic) video produced by my students:

And here is Prof. Wesch’s Original:

High School Digme Courses Inspire

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2 years ago
by Seth in , ,

Minneapolis Roosevelt High School students have been using blogs, Twitter, wikis, video, podcasts and other digital media in their English lessons.

At the University of Minnesota they have been looking at how the Roosevelt High School “Digme” programme has given students an opportunity to engage with English lessons in a way they never did previously. Judging by some of the feedback in the video, the use of Web 2.0 tools has inspired the students so much that they now really look forward to their English lessons.

Apart from mygeneral interest in the use of ICT in education, this program has really grabbed my attention as the school seems to be doing almost exactly the same kind of activity that I’ve been doing with my students this year at Martino Martini in Italy. I too have been using Twitter to facilitate e-twinning, podcasts and voice recordings to encourage oral fluency videos of science experiments and a social studies video to enthuse the students and encourage them to use the target language.I have also been using a wiki to co-ordinate the whole programme and give teachers, students and parents one central place to check up on the latest classroom activities.

In short, they’re doing just what I’m doing. It’s nice to know that you’re heading in the right direction! :)

Have a look at this video of the U.S. students to see how positive they seem about the whole project.

Improve your PowerPoints in 45 minutes

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2 years ago
by Seth in ,

I saw a fantastic video by Alvin Trusty recently where he talks about how to create high-quality PowerPoint presentations. There are many great ideas in his video, among the ones that I really liked were the use of Flickr Creative Commons photos, the excellent Flickr photo search tool Compfight (which also finds creative Commons photos for you) and Alvin’s move and grow Powerpoint animation (watch the video to find out how this works!) I used the advice in this video to write the Philosophically Speaking PowerPoint lesson I recently posted here. It’s good advice!

Although this video is 45 minutes long, I think you’ll agree that it’s 45 minutes that are VERY well spent! Enjoy!


How to Create a Great PowerPoint – Take 2.0 from Alvin Trusty on Vimeo.

WARNING! This video will seriously damage your contentedness with previous PowerPoints you’ve made! I am now re-doing several of my favourite PowerPoint lessons!

Best,
Seth.

April 1st? But you’re no fool!

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2 years ago
by Seth in

Okay, okay, I know this has nothing whatsoever to do with education, but I just had to share this amazing video, especially seeing as it’s April Fool’s day and I doubt anyone will believe it’s real. I’m almost sure it is though.

If I were to tell you it’s filmed in Wales, it’s quite possibly one of the maddest things I’ve seen done with sheep and you’ll wonder how on earth they managed to do it.. well.. I’m sure you’ll never guess what they’ve done in this film. It’s quite incredible!

All the very best,

Seth :-)

Social Media in Plain English

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2 years ago
by Seth in ,

Social Media – Blogs, Podcasts, Photo sharing,  Video Blogs (Vlogs) etc – as we know these can be really versatile tools to use with our students.

This video by Lee LeFever from the fantastic Common Craft explains why the “Social” part of social media is bringing new life to publishing while allowing small, content publishers (our students?) to have meaningful interaction with other students and their readers/listeners/viewers via the comments system. If you’re looking for a simple explanation of all this, you can’t go wrong with this golden oldie (from 2008!)

If you have lower-level students you can also find a subtitled version of the video on the Dot Sub website.

Being a Teacher Inspires

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3 years ago
by Seth in , , ,

I got the TeacherTube 2008 list of their Top-Voted Videos of 2008 last week. The No. 1 video (based on TeacherTube viewer votes) is this one below. It made me realise what a privilege it is to have an education and therefore what an important and role and huge responsibility we have as educators.

The video is made by 4th grade students an it’s called “My Hero“

The description of the video is: “This movie was made by a group of Grade 4 students in Bradford, Ontario, Canada. It is about a former child soldier, Sidibay, from Sierra Leone. “

It’s truly inspiring.

How could you use this in class?

I think this is such an inspiring video, just like 6 Billion Others which I wrote some lessons ideas for here, it would be a real shame not to use it with students.

  • Get your students to write to someone who is their hero. Choose a real person and get them to send the letter too.
  • Ask the students to discuss the video together in pairs, then to post a summary of their thoughts about Sidibay as a comment on the original TeacherTube video.
  • Record a podcast (or any audio) of your students discussing who their hero is and why.  Play it back to the class. Share it with other classes. Ask other classes to record something about their own hero.
  • Hold a vote in-class and choose a class hero. Shoot a short video similar to this about the person. Post it to Teacher tube. If your class can’t think of a hero, you could get them to look through http://www.mylifeisastory.org/ They’ll definitely find some amazing, inspiring kids there who could be a good candidate for hero status.

I’d love to know what you think of this video, or if you have any other ideas of how you coould use it in class. Please leave me a comment if you have any ideas you’d like to share.

Warm Regards, Seth

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