Videos in Education

Video has proven to be highly beneficial in my classroom. As a foreign language teacher, I use videos frequently, they are part of the textbook curriculum. The videos that go along with the text include snapshots of various Spanish speaking countries (as well as cities within the U.S.) and highlight Hispanic culture in those areas. They also show short dialogues using the vocabulary from each chapter so students can see real Spanish conversations in relatively realistic situations. It helps them to hear accurate pronunciation of the language, hear how it's used in context, see images of the vocabulary words as they're being spoken, and partly experience Hispanic culture, all in about 15 minutes per video segment. In addition to the textbook videos (which are highly beneficial, but at times cliche), I've used videos to teach concepts that are better understood visually. For example, when I taught a short unit on Frida Kahlo, I showed a video which included many examples of her art. My students found this far more engaging than just reading about her. The video was much easier for me to use than if I had shown photocopies or printouts of her artwork. The video also incorporated her life story, as well as that of Diego Rivera, and did so in a much more organized fashion than I think I would have been able to have done without hours of preparation. I've also, more recently, used videos I'd found on unitedstreaming(discovery education), which I discovered during this class! The videos were a little difficult to convert to a DVD (which I had to do since I don't have a digital projector), but it was worth the extra effort on my part. I had explained the conjugation of a certain verb as many ways as I could think of to my students. I taught from the textbook, explained it the way that I had learned it, and even found supplemental worksheets to reinforce the concept. Many of my students were still just not getting it. I used a unitedstreaming video which explained the verb in an engaging way--lots of visuals and a little bit of humor--and many of my students showed serious progress in following assessments. It also, in a weird way, made me feel like I had earned some credibility with them! All of my rambling about pronouns and subjects and infinitives was exactly what they were hearing in the video (apparently in a more interesting way!) and it almost proved that I was right! Miss Saylor does know what she's talking about! It isn't practical for me to incorporate a video into every lesson, and I don't think that's the point of using video. It should be used to supplement instruction and reinforce certain points in a lesson. I also liked the videos from unitedstreaming because they were only about 10 minutes long, short enough for me to teach almost a full lesson, use the video to support what I was teaching, and give the students some time to practice. I can think of one college class in which I used video, and it was an Education course. We used video to film ourselves teaching a lesson. It was really interesting to see ourselves teach. We could better reflect on our teaching. It made it easy to see how often teachers say "umm" and how much they circulate around the classroom. It also showed how engaged our "students" (classmates) were. I've also been thinking about other ways I could incorporate, or my college professors could have incorporated, video. For Spanish, it would be awesome if students who study abroad (myself included) were required to film parts of their experience and then come back to a class in the U.S. to present their videos. This would allow students take a virtual tour of maybe ten or fifteen different countries! It might even be neat to ask students to interview their host families or teachers in the countries they visit. Then students back home could hear the variations in Spanish spoken in different countries and explore the differences in culture in those countries. As always, the resources, or lack thereof, would make it a little difficult to accomplish, but I think it would be a really cool project!