The Power of Video

What's the best app or tool you have on your iPad? Surprisingly, it is one of the simplest, and yet most versatile options you have - the camera. This feature gives students the ability to share their learning and their work with others in an incredibly user friendly way.  Students are also motivated when know their work is going to be on camera and shared with others.

So what are some ways you could incorporate the use of the camera tool in your classroom? One option to try would be to use the camera for students to share their learning and explain their thinking behind a problem or standard.  Not only does this cement that information for the student, but it gives the teacher an insight on the thought process of that specific student.  The teacher can use that information to further personalize the learning of the student to meet his or her needs. In this specific example, students were able to upload and share their videos on Seesaw to share with others. Imagine the pride a student has after sharing his or her video with the entire class!

Another great way to incorporate the camera into a classroom would be to use iMovie to create a movie of the students’ writing.  This example is from a first grade classroom where the students learned about all the features of fairy tales and were able to use Legos to help inspire their own stories.  Once they had written their fairy tales, the students were able to take pictures of each scene of their fairy tale and record their voice reading their fairy tale.  Once they were done with their movie, they were able to share it with their class. Each student had such self satisfaction when sharing their video with others in seeing their video start from a written story and turn into a masterpiece!

This year has been the year of the green screen! Teachers from many grade levels have given students the opportunity to create green screen videos explaining a topic or a story using historical characters. Students use the app DoInk to put together their video with a background of their choosing that helps to support their topic of learning.  In the example below, students were given the opportunity to explain a math topic of their choice and share it with the rest of their class.  In a flipped math classroom, this is a great feature for the teacher to use in upcoming years since the students love hearing from fellow students on how to work out a problem.

How much do you use video in your classroom? How could it enhance the learning of your students? How could it give you more information about each of your students? I challenge you to try one of these or just the camera in general in your classroom and see what an impact it can make!