On Tuesday, I was with a small group of Year 10 geography pupils sitting in our new multimedia room. We were clustered round a laptop waiting for a video call using skype. The call was coming in from Antarctica from Robert Swan, who is currently living at the 2041 E-Base relying solely on renewable energy for the first time in Antarctic history.
The call came through and there we were having a live video chat with Robert about the issue of climate change and what we can all do about it. Wow! Now that’s what I cal education for the 21st Century.
The use of skype from remote locations presents numerous possibilities for engaging young people in environmental and social issues. The software is free. The calls are over the internet, so you just pay for the use of the internet during that time (a bit more expensive somewhere like Antarctica where you are reliant on satellite networks such as BGAN).
If anyone could tell me how I could take part in a live conversation taking place using something like skype, and show it on a website simultaneously, I would be eternally grateful!
If you are making Digital Video for the classroom, here are a few pointers to make life easier for teachers:
1-4 minutes is great for Key Stage 3 (ages 11-14)
5-20 minutes is great for Key Stages 4 and 5 (ages 14-19), where a more in depth exploration of a topic may be useful (although short clips are also still useful)
attention in the classroom can be lost in the blink of an eye, so it’s great if video can be integrated into interactive whiteboard software - the most commonly used is the SMART Board software, Notebook
Notebook currently only supports Flash Video (.flv and .swf) and so Digital Video should be downloadable in either of these two formats
If you are a teacher looking to integrate Digital Video into your SMART Board resources:
TechCrunch writes a great review of web video, noting that things have moved on since Google bought YouTube a year ago. Incredibly informative and a must for anyone looking to host video online.
Please, please, please don’t host your video only on YouTube or similar media-sharing sites. Only the most enlightened schools haven’t blocked these.
By all means use a service such as tubemogul to propagate your video on a number of sites. This will mean that young people can access your content on their own terms outside of school.
I am looking to develop a hosting service for teachers, schools and other developers of educational web video. If you don’t have the ability to host web video at the moment and want your films to be viewed in the classroom, Digital Explorer should be able to help sometime in 2008. Busy times ahead!
There are two things that I have noticed when using web video in the classroom. The first and most pertinent is pupils asking me to enlarge the player to full-screen. When using media players such as Windows Media Player or Real Player this is fairly simple. The complication comes with embedded flash video. In a Year 11 Citizenship class examining the issues of debt and aid, I used video from the Make Poverty History website. The problem was that the videos could not be enlarged. This left some of the less enthusiastic members of the class fairly disgruntled.
ask your school IT department to upgrade to Flash version 9 (this will mean that the enlarge function will work)
produce video using the .flv format, which will ’stretch’ without the image becoming too blocky
The second issue is the 10-20 seconds gap between pressing play and the video starting. This is enough time for young minds to wander or assume that their teacher is a technological incompetent (I still hold that by some quirk, teachers’ ability to function a DVD/Video player has a strong inverse correlation with their length of time in the classroom). This is a mistake that we made (as with the one above) on the Offscreen Student Expedition, by having a black screen and a boring pre-loader (the small animation that shows as the video gets ready to play).
The solution:
have an still image rather than a black screen before the video plays
think about having some interesting animation going on so that pupils know that something is about to happen (nothing too extravagant)
or maybe use some attention grabbing optical illusion that will keep their attention (if you stare at the dot below for long enough the grey haze recedes)
Further to my comments below about the barriers to using any facet of web 2.0 in the classroom, I was pointed to this inspiring video from the Born Free Foundation. If you were in most schools in the UK, you wouldn’t be able to watch this video. It would be blocked because it is hosted on a media-sharing site.
Christian, the lion, was released into the wild, having been raised by keepers at the Born Free Foundation. After a year, they go back to the area where they released him, and called his name. Watch the video to see what happened next…
Currently working on a couple of film projects with Marjan Shirzad, which I hope to be able to post soon. The first will be a re-cut of our Shimshal 2006 expedition where we developed our Google Earth work in North Pakistan and the second (very exciting!) will be the film of the first Digital Explorer expedition with Eastbury Comprehensive to Morocco in March/April 2006.
On Tuesday, I was with a small group of Year 10 geography pupils sitting in our new multimedia room. We were clustered round a laptop waiting for a video call using skype. The call was coming in from Antarctica from Robert Swan, who is currently living at the 2041 E-Base relying solely on renewable energy for the first time in Antarctic history.
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