Week 9-"Caught on Video"

There were a lot of really cool ideas of ways to incorporate videos into the classroom that Rob Spankle talked about in his blog "Caught on Video".

There were many ideas about how to turn many different aspects of the classroom and being a teacher into an approach that is more interactive. Some of the ideas that stuck out to me were 1) making video "newsletters" to send home that the kids help to make. Kids are more likely to make sure their parents see the video than hand them a typical newsletter. Record questions students have about a unit before it begins and later tape them answering the questions themselves after the unit has completed, 3) Film hooks outside of the classroom to relate lessons to the outside world and grab students attention, 4) make a video for a sub that will fill in to you where you can refer him/her to previous lesson videos, and 5)Record memories to make a class video at the end of the year.

These were just some of the many ideas that Spankle posted on his blog. When I read through all of them, my first thought was "Isn't this a little overkill? It's going to take so much time to do all of this." However, I don't think that Spnakle was trying to convince teachers that they should incorporate all of these ideas into their classroom, but show them that getting an easy to use and accessible video camera is a good investment because there are so many ways that you could use it. For many things, such as incorporating videos into lesson plans, it will take a lot of work initially, but from then on, it is set with maybe some minor tweaking in the future.

Overall, these ideas were very helpful in helping me to recognize the wide range of applications that a video camera could help to create in a classroom.