CONFERENC E
INFOBYTES
Digital Video and the 21st Century Learner
A persistent challenge in educating children of the 21st that we, as teachers, were not children of the 21st
century is century. Generally
speaking, we have not experienced media and technology in our developmental years in the way that children in our classrooms have. This makes it difficult for us to conceive of the ways that media and technology can support student learning in our classrooms. As an elementary and middle school technology teacher, I have used digital video-based projects to engage students intellectually and to motivate them to inquire into the world around them.
If you wonder what about the medium of video is so compelling, consider the last time you recorded a voice mail greeting for your cell-phone, or home or office voice mail. What exactly was your process? How many times did you listen to your greeting before settling on the final product? What were you listening for to convince yourself that this final version was the one? The process we engage in when recording this greeting shares features, I venture to say, with the writing workshop process. We have a general sense of the ideas we want to convey and the language we will use in that audio greeting; and then we record, revise, and rerecord iteratively, listening for content, tone, fluency, and length (among other things). The stakes are high, because we genuinely want this short audio message to capture who we are, perhaps across both professional and personal identities, and what we want to say to a large pool of potential callers. I’d argue that there is good reason for one to care so much about a simple audio greeting.
Digital video-based projects are, for today’s learners, compelling in a similar way that a voice-mail greeting might be for you and me. When I ask students to gather ideas through research with the intention of ultimately producing a video-based project to publish on School-Tube, YouTube or on a website as a downloadable video, my students are moved to create something that is true to
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By Kevin Upton
their own convictions and that authentically reflects their voice. They are also compelled to know what they are talking about, whether I have asked them to publish a video on bullying or environmental protection. Students who otherwise struggle often invest extra time out of school in these projects; and students across a wide range of ability levels tend to work together productively. It is my belief that the video-based product has a quality of authenticity that creates a sense of purpose and ownership in students. This is because of the real audience for their video-based product and the fact that students themselves are physically and aurally represented in the video. Just as you and I care about the greeting on our voice mail, students set their own high stakes when they are telling the world what they believe about any of a number of issues. And of course, it doesn’t hurt that they are learning a lot all the while! I believe deeply that students are gaining important cross- disciplinary learning opportunities – at once delving into the critical areas of language arts (reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing and representing) while also gaining significant knowledge about content.
To learn more about digital video-based
projects, attend my session Digital Video Integration at the 2012 MACUL Conference.
Kevin Upton is a middle school technology teacher at Milan Middle School. He has also been a teacher at Symons Elementary School in Milan and in several schools in the Detroit Public School District. In addition to his work as a teacher, Kevin is a teacher educator at the University of Michigan and energy manager for Milan Area Schools.
Conference 2012
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MACULJOURNAL
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