I really enjoyed creating this video while travelling to visit family in Victoria. One of the curricular goals in my Social Studies class is to have students make ethical judgements about historical events, and I thought it would be interesting to introduce students to the repatriation efforts going on at the Royal British Columbia Museum.
I started by using my laptop and cell phone to record video footage, and found the camera on my smartphone to be of excellent quality. The footage was both of myself talking, and of the artifacts and building I was talking about, and once I had recorded these videos I transfered those files to the iMovie program. I have used other editing software before, but iMovie is so easy and intuitive, that I tend to use it regularly when creating short videos for students. I find it easy to manipulate the video and audio functions, and while there isn’t as much user control as some other applications, I find it serves my purposes for almost everything I need it to do.
I used iMovie to record audio which I overlaid on top of the video files and then edited in some titles at the start and as a way to display a question for students. I really tried to keep the tone of the video conversational, and to speak directly to students, as a way to engage students. I also made sure to couple both audio and text when using titles as per Mayer’s multimedia principle (Mayer, 2014).
I then used the Screencastify extension for Google Chrome to record a short screencast going over a rubric I would use to evaluate students on the presentation that they would create for me after watching this video. I have done screencasts explaining, step by step, how students could use a new software or strategy, but haven’t ever used them to go over assessment criteria. I could see myself using a screencast in this manner in the future as it provides a permanent record of me explaining my expectations that students could come back to multiple times if they wanted clarification about something in a rubric. This 24 hour availability is one of the things which Woolfit identified as a benefit of video capturing lectures, and I think it is clear that it would be beneficial for my students to have these expectations at their fingertips at any time (Woolfit, 2015). Once created, a screencast like this could be used any time the rubric was used, and so I think it would be a valuable use of time.
Because the screencast and the video fit together as part of the same assignment that I would use, I went back and edited them together in iMovie, and then I uploaded my video to Youtube.com. I think this is the easiest way to generate captions and I will be going back to ensure that the auto-generated ones reflect what I would like them to.
You can watch my edited video here. The video references the Royal BC Museum’s repatriation policy, which can be found here if you would like to read it.
References:
Mayer, R. E. (2014). Multimedia instruction. In J. M. Spector, M. D. Merrill, J. Elen, & M. J. Bishop (Eds.), Handbook of research on educational communications and technology (4th ed., pp. 385-399). Springer Science & Business Media. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3185-5
Woolfit, Z. (2015). The effective use of video in higher education (Rep.), 10-38. Retrieved October 2, 2018, from https://www.inholland.nl/media/10230/the-effective-use-of-video-in-higher-education-woolfitt-october-2015.pdf
