Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Students Should Produce Talking Head Video

I made the movie below with online students in mind, but perhaps it makes sense for on ground students as well. Here's a bit about the logistics in case anyone wants to try it.

The movie is just about 1 minute. It was recorded at 640x480 with a frame rate I'd guess at around 30 frames per second. The resulting file was about 11.5 MB in .wmv format. When that was done I uploaded it to YouTube. I do have a good connection in the office and certainly at school network traffic is lower now that we're in summer session. Your mileage may vary. But the putting in the meta data, the upload, and processing took 7 minutes. Then it spit out the html to embed the video in the blog. It took another 3 minutes for the video to actually be available. From my point of view that's not too bad. Of course, I've done quite a few of these so more or less know what to do. A student doing it for the first time would have a harder time. But my guess is that they'd figure it out quickly --- the skill has alternative uses beyond the class so should be valued.

The only real issue I can see with this is if English is not the first language or the student has some disability that makes speaking difficult. Otherwise, I'd do this if I were teaching now.


2 comments:

Kassissieh said...

We have a Spanish teacher using this technique extensively with fourth and fifth grade students -- without the YouTube bit! At this age, the kids are most concerned about watching themselves over and over again and gradually perfecting their oral presentations.

Lanny Arvan said...

I'm guessing that make those videos at the school. Do you have any experience with them making the videos at home? That's really what I'm about here, albeit with college-aged students.