In beginning this line of inquiry, i think we had a much different understanding of where it would take us. Originally, as we all come from a sports background, we thought it would be really great to use vlogs in a PE setting, where students could use videos to self or peer assess themselves, as well as giving teachers the option to annotate video with tips/suggestions. That hasn’t changed, however we began to realize the potential scope of such a tool need not be so limited. In using a classroom ipad/chromebook or even personal devices from home, students have the ability to be involved in and demonstrate their learning through various ways, with video perhaps being a slightly untapped resource.
Depending on how creative the teacher is, implementing the use of imovie, screencastify and VideoAnt in the classroom could help drive student engagement and ownership of their learning. This would ideally be done early on, as well as consistently throughout the year. Going to lengths in order to help children feel comfortable working with these applications would be integral and would go a long way in predicting the quality of the learning outcomes. We envision these applications being used to create video demonstrating a student’s progress and process of developing and researching their own line of inquiry. This would help visually demonstrate to a teacher the path taken by the student in which they discovered their findings, as well as allowing the teacher and student to open a dialogue within the videos themselves using the annotate tool on VideoAnt. In this way, feedback can be given to help guide the student if necessary. This could also be incredibly beneficial on group projects, as well as in final presentations. Creating these videos and uploading them to VideoAnt (either from a private YouTube or from their computer itself) will help individual and groups of students build a visual map of their inquiry. The greatest strength comes from the ability to annotate videos, and as mentioned create a dialogue. This feedback loop on the videos can help students feel they are involved in the assessment process- a powerful method to promote student ownership.
The biggest questions/concerns we have for our inquiry is regarding privacy. Having videos stored in the US may not be possible and as such a different online tool would be required. We believe however that through ensuring YouTube/VideoAnt accounts are private, as well as asking for informed consent from parents, that this could be possible in the classroom. In cases where it wasn’t, this would be relatively easy to work around (on a case by case basis).
To use these tools, iMovie is available on all apple products, and Movavi video editor can be used in it’s place on windows products. Screencastify is an easy to find and download chrome add on which is extremely user friendly. Finally, VideoAnt is accessible at https://ant.umn.edu/welcome. The possibilities with these tools are very open ended, and may pay great dividends if incorporated into your classroom!
Adrian, Riley & Ari
