Last week, our class discussed the benefits of using videos as a learning tool. Videos have been used throughout my schooling. I always found them useful in my learning because they tended to be more engaging to watch and listen to than always listening to the teacher. I remember watching lots of science and psychology videos. Often these videos were able to explain concepts succinctly while providing helpful visuals. While I was aware of some of the benefits of videos, there were some I hadn’t considered. For example, our class discussed how videos allow students to see the unseeable. If you’re teaching your class about plate tectonics, videos provide a great way for students to visualize how they work. Additionally, videos are extremely helpful for independent learning. If a student is stuck on a concept, they can watch a video, pause it, rewind it, and rewatch it as many times as needed. As a teacher, even if you don’t show the video in class, it can be helpful to share videos with students that they can watch at home for more explanation. We also discussed the benefits of teachers and students creating their own videos. For example, teachers can create videos of themselves demonstrating a process, perhaps they make a video of themselves walking through the steps of a task using screen sharing, allowing students to watch and follow along. Students can make videos as a way to demonstrate their learning, this allows for creativity and a different form of showing their understanding. This led to our video workshop with Rich McCue from the Digital Scholarship Commons. In this workshop, we used iMovie to create our own videos and experiment with its various features. I am fairly familiar with iMovie, but the workshop was definitely a good refresher since it had been a while since I used it. As well, the website Rich McCue shared with us is a great cheat sheet for how to use iMovie. There is also a section on how to use green-screen videos. I didn’t get that far in the workshop, but I am excited to explore it further. I can totally see my group using that function in our educational technology project.
The video I created in our video workshop is a little compilation of some of my favourite clips from my backpacking trip in 2023. Because I took these videos with my phone upright, it won’t fully take up the screen. In the future, I’ll have to take videos horizontally on my phone to get a better-quality video. Check it out!