Video Explanations for Language Arts

Level - Primary --- Content: Language Arts

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In Ms Ryan’s primary classroom, it seemed that some of her students were simply not ready for the lessons that she was teaching in language arts.  A good portion of her curriculum dealt with mechanics of writing; sentence construction, punctuation and rules of grammar.  Some of the students mastered these skills quickly but others needed lots of reinforcement.  Rather than teaching the same concepts over and over again, Ms. Ryan decided to use the video camera built into her laptop and record a series of lessons on writing mechanics.  Her first lessons were quite simple. To teach the proper use of quotation marks, for example, she simply stood at the whiteboard in the front of her room and recorded the lesson as she would have taught it previously.  She then posted the video on her class Web site. 

As Ms Ryan gained confidence, she experimented using Jing to capture sentence examples from her word processer and Microsoft MovieMaker to integrate her video images with those examples.
One day at lunch, several of her students were watching her intently as she worked on a new lesson.  The students asked if they might create some lessons.  Ms Ryan agreed and enlisted the art teacher to give the students instruction on tips for effective video production.  The students learned to frame the subject appropriately and several techniques to interest and surprise the audience.  Ms Ryan was surprised at the quality that could be achieved with that tiny camera in the laptop!  The computer teacher from the middle school stopped in to work with the students on Movie Maker and Jing.  Soon the students were creating video explanations of a quality that she knew she could use in future years.

In subsequent years, Ms Ryan used the production of explanatory videos as a small group assignment for all students.  Ms Ryan used these products to assess students understanding of mechanics as well as their use of the technology tools using a two-component rubric.  The art teacher located a video production rubric on a local university’s Web site and worked with the students to “translate” the rubric into age-appropriate language.  The rubric included elements of planning, content quality and characteristics of effective visual techniques.  Ms Ryan then used the mechanics sections of the national writing rubric as the basis for the content assessment.  She actually found that, if a student was struggling with some area of writing mechanics, assigning them to a group developing a video explanation of that area resulted in significant improvement!

Tools Used in this Scenario:
Video Explanations: Microsoft MovieMaker

Visualization Tools: Web Cam software, Microsoft MovieMaker, Jing http://www.jingproject.com

Technology for Assessment