District Wide Information

Videos in Education

I attended the SW/WC Tech Conference last Friday.  One session presented by Doug Johnson titled Developing the Creativity in Every Learner resonated with me.  He said, "Show a kid a movie, you have entertained her for an hour. Give a kid a camera, you’ll engage her for a lifetime."He posed the question, "How do we define, encourage, use, and assess creativity in our lessons and projects?  Should the question be if a student is creative or how a student is creative?"  He reminded us that creativity isn't just associated with fine arts.  I believe student made videos are fantastic way for students to show what they have learned in your classes through Bloom's Taxonomy of Higher Order Thinking particularily with creating.   I have posted in the past how to create explainer videos like Lee LeFever's Common Craft videos, but have now come across more explainer videos by Planet Nutshell.  As in the following article:
5 Reasons to Make an Explainer Video http://planetnutshell.com/nutshell-news/5-reasons-to-make-an-explainer-video  Planet Nutshell has many explainer videos including internet safety videos for grades K-12 http://planetnutshell.com/videos/?c=utah-education-network, FAFSA in a Nutshell http://planetnutshell.com/videos/fafsa-in-a-nutshell, and  Climate Change videos http://planetnutshell.com/videos/?c=corporation-for-public-broadcasting among many others!  Another source that I like is a previous post of John and Hank Green's Crash Course videos http://www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse.  These videos are great to add to your curriculum, but they also model/present a great way students could make videos to explain what they have learned in class.   A great example of student made videos is for following video made by three Marshall High School students explaining Copyright Law http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXF0Tnkfrm0  I've used this video to teach about copyright and plagiarism at the Middle School level.  The possibility of student made videos is endless and powerful!