Saturday, February 7, 2009

Using video in the classroom

As we work through this module on creating compelling experiences through video, I find that it is much easier to relate video to my classroom, than it was to relate photography. How often do we as teachers hear "Can we watch a move?", or "Why do we never watch movies in here?" As math teacher, I have often shown videos really just to be showing videos to make the students happy.
I have found myself using many math videos off of united streaming and teacher tube. However, while some of these videos are great, others are terrible. There have been times where I have noticed my students more bored by a video than by normal teaching. However, there are many times where students enjoy a video. For example, after a student did a presentation on Pythagoras, we stumbled upon "Donald in Mathmagicland", which students loved. After working on the pythagorean theorem, we watched the part of "The Wizard of Oz" where the scarecrow is given his brain and states "the sum of the squares of two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square of the third side". The students were led to test this statement only to find out how untrue it was!
I think that as teachers using video in a classroom, it is important for us to recognize what video is helpful as well as compelling to the students, and this is something I hope I can continue to do, and become better at!

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