Digital Video

Throughout both my school and university education, I have encountered use of digital tools such as PowerPoint. However it was not until now that I have been introduced to the “Movie-Maker” program. I decided to experiment with this program because I was scrolling through the automatically existing programs on my computer and came across this program. I didn’t realise that this program was already on my computer, I thought I would have to install it. Knowing nothing about how to operate this program, I would have to comment that it was very user-friendly! The captions providing instructions were very helpful and it didn’t take long at all to create my own movie! I see great potential for this type of resource in the classroom. Also, I did some further reading on this, and discovered that Schuck and Kearney (2004, p.8) state that using digital video with classrooms creates very positive effects. Using research, these two experts state that the following student learning outcomes are directly related to the incorporation of this technology:  “Development of movie-making skills  Development of spoken and written literacies  Development of media literacy skills  Improvement of presentation skills  Understanding of the subject content or topic  Increase in autonomous behaviour  Increased engagement and motivation” (Schuck & Kearney, 2004, p.8-9) After reading through these facts, I began to reflect on all the possible uses for this form of technology in the classroom, some of my ideas I have listed below:  Assessment piece – students required to make a movie outlining their journey through a specified area of learning  Used as a resource to collate ideas using images and words  Used as a culminating tool – to display students’ activities to peers or parents  Used as the assessment piece for a Technology unit – students put together a movie showing the progress of an invention process  Used as a form of stimulus for literacy learning – students are presented with an image of movie, from which they must make their own meaning and write a story I think that this tool would be easily implemented within any age group. One issue I see however would be that of Copywrite regarding the images used. This would be a difficult aspect to manage as students could be finding images from a number of resources and by law, these would need to be correctly referenced. One way to cater for this aspect that I can see however would be that the teacher goes through and creates an easy-to-access folder on the student computers, consisting of a variety of images that the teacher has pre-selected and referenced. This way, the teacher could instruct students to simply choose pictures from only that folder; however this would be somewhat limiting for the students and time-consuming for the teacher. Overall however, this is a tool I would aim to implement into my own classroom! Below is a digital video I created using Movie-Maker and a collection of my own photos, have a look!