Blog # 3 Video Re-submission Blog

Enhancing Learning through Educational Videos

I can remember my second year of teaching, I had a student who rarely understood the standards
in class. Finally, we came up with the idea to give her supplementary videos to watch at home.
She came back the next day completely enthused that she was starting to understand concepts!
A recent study done by Mckinny, Dyke and Lumber found that the students using video podcasts
performed significantly better than the students in the regular physical
classroom (Hsing and Cigas, 2013). I found this information to be extremely helpful, especially
knowing that the data was coming from a math classroom. Hsing and Cigas also gave qualitative
feedback from actual students in the study. Here are some of the samples the journal notes
(Hsing and Cigas, 2013, p. 6):

 • “I went from not getting it at all to saying ‘oh, that's easy’ after the first video. It's so much
easier to comprehend when you do it step by step like that and I can see it all laid out.
Can you do this every week? I know it's a lot, but it would help me out tremendously.” 

• “The videos you posted each week was a great help to me in understanding the material in
this class. I can't thank you enough for the videos.” 

• “The course videos the professor posted were extremely helpful. Questions that were asked;
both email and message board, were promptly answered with helpful responses. The
supplemental material posted by the professor was a blessing.”

The first quote that I read in chapter six of Crafting Digital Writing was “I think it is very
important that films make people look at what they’ve forgotten” (Hicks, 2013, p. 96).

As an educator, this made me reflect and say how can I incorporate more videos in my
classroom to enhance learning beyond the four walls of my classroom? One idea that I
am taking from Hicks’ is for students to write in notebooks for a period of time and then
take the words from the notebook to craft an animated movie! This idea sounds super
exciting and engaging for my group of middle school students! One aspect that Troy mentioned that 
I found to be enlightening is that giving children and opportunity to play with video editing task
is often a great way to lead up to bigger digital projects (Troy, 2013). My ultimate goal is to win
a grant so that I can have a paperless classroom, so using smaller videos to build to bigger projects
sounds amazing. Troys states “Videos can also simply be a series of images that are linked
together in timeline that scroll across a screen” (Troy, 2013, p. 139) 

In retrospect, I would like to start the school year off next year with a video introduction. 
The article “Nine Steps to Create the Perfect Teacher” states “An introduction video provides
a preview of your unique characteristics and what it’ll be like to work with you. Students are
attracted to teachers who are easy to speak with and are passionate about their
subject” (“Nine Steps”, n.d.). I am made a new classroom introductory video for this blog
using animoto.com. 

References:

“Eurekly.” Eurekly, https://eurekly.com/blog/9-steps-to-create-the-perfect-teacher-introduction-video/.

Hsin , Wen-Jung, and John Cigas. “Short Videos Improve Student Learning Online.”
JCSC, May 2013, http://delivery.acm.org/10.1145/2460000/2458622/p253-hsin.pdf?ip=71.12.96.
250&id=2458622&acc=PUBLIC&key=4D4702B0C3E38B35.4D4702B0C3E38B35.96353CD5
575854CD.4D4702B0C3E38B35&__acm__=1573086717_b1484369e7ebf67b9748e943bf8629b9.

Troy, Hicks. Crafting Digital Writing: Composing Texts across Media and Genres. Heinemann, 2013.

Turner, Kristen Hawley, and Troy Hicks. Argument in the Real World: Teaching Adolescents to Read
and Write Digital Texts. Heinemann, 2017.