To tell you the truth,  I was a bit apprehensive about just handing over the Utra Flip camcorder and telling my students to create a video without teaching them  how to do it  first.

Amazingly,  not one student had a problem with that, and I wondered why.  Then, it dawned on me.  Of course! Many of them are  already creating mini videos all the time using cell phones. They love  filming snippets 0f their lives- think YouTube.  Since I’m always looking for ways to engage my students, it makes perfect  sense to me to have my students create videos in the classroom   to demonstrate their learning.  Student created videos  are  another evaluation tool teachers can use.

I’ve gotten a few pointers about the technical aspects of filming and editing videos from other teachers  who actually know what they are doing  and when the class reflects upon what well and what could be improved,  we’ll discuss these.  I’m not evaluating the technical aspects of the video anyway.  That wouldn’t be fair to the students.

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Comments

3 Responses to “Videos can be an effective evaluation tool”

  1. Andy M on April 3rd, 2009 5:46 pm

    Thanks Elona. The use of video is great, and the flip-cam is one of the easiest. I found that students in my maths classes, 15 year olds, were not too keen on having their “faces” videoed though. Perhaps doing maths has a stigma. However once they were introduced to the concepts of the Common Craft ( http://www.commoncraft.com/) they became quite “animated”. Some of them are now producing wonderful short videos, showing only their hands solving geometry problems. For me the teacher it is a useful assessment tool as the audio content of their discussions adds another dimension to their written content….and all in the one compact video.
    Like you, I found that simply handing the students the flip-cam with a few hints was enough to get a result. Cheers

  2. Elona Hartjes on April 4th, 2009 2:14 pm

    Andy,
    I too like the commoncraft videos. Thanks for reminding me about them. I think I’ll introduce that type of only hands video and ask my grade 10 math students to create their own’ I can hardly wait to see what they come up with.

  3. Making movies for the first time. - Beyond Chalk Blog on October 14th, 2010 11:09 pm

    [...] http://www.teachersatrisk.com/2009/03/29/videos-can-be-an-effective-evaluation-tool/ Written by Beyond Chalk Blog . Beyond Chalk Blog Filed Under: General. [...]

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    These are my personal views and not those of my employer.