Tales of Fear and Madnessis a collection of horror stories written by students at our school who participated in our Halloween Writing Contest and only slightly edited by myself.
I'm embedding the book here -you can read it online or order your very own paper copy at Storyjumper.
El curso de ProfeTubers se está terminando, y toca despedirnos. Me ha gustado un montón, aunque sí eché de menos la presencialidad.
Creo que he mejorado bastante en eso de hacer vídeos, y he podido reflexionar sobre qué hace un buen vídeo educativo. Y, ¡madre mía, cuánto he experimentado en estas semanas!
Mi tuora, Noelia, me ha ayudado un montón, y me ha encantado intercambiar ideas con todos vosotrxs.
He hecho un pequeño vídeo con mis reflexiones -echad un vistazo. Lo adjunto aquí.
There are many ways to use videos in online learning -from playful activities to really tough, information-dense and very challenging quizzes.
This past week, I used the latter approach with my Third Bilingual, a group made up of very talented but sometimes rather less than attentive students. We are currently working on a project about American history -they are producing videos about important personalities from the history of the USA, learning about the following major issues:
The English language (spoken and written), especially talking about the past.
American history.
Use of tools of digital creation: videos, audio editing, screen presentations etc.
Obviously, they needed some filling in on American history, as well as some extended listening and writing practice, as well as models to work off. I believe in giving tough models (my own English teacher had us read "1984" in the original when I was their age, with fewer years of English classes, and it worked very well), so I made two videos for them. One, on Sequoyah, served primarily as a model. The other one, a rather longer video presentation on the period between independence and the civil war, served primarily to impart the necessary background information. In both, I abstained from showing my face as I don't want them, being minors, to show theirs. An aesthetic flaw, yes, but I needed to drive that message home.
I used the latter video as an assessment tool as well, using an internet-based quiz produced with Google Forms and embedded in a page that also held the video, in a different iframe. It looked about like this (I've filled in the form already to test it and create the model solution, but a copy is embedded below). Clicking on it ought to enlarge it for better viewing:
Now I'm awaiting the results -it appears the students rather liked the video but hated the questions. I may have reached too high in this one, as some of them found it very hard. Note for future me: make it easier, even when discussing tricky questions.
So, I'm embedding both the video and a copy of the questionnaire in this post -I hope you like both.
This is the form:
I somewhat changed the form for this post, of course: the original has the respondents' names in a drop-down menu, collects e-mail addresses, and empties answers into a text document -a trick achieved by using DocAppender..
The general concept, I think, has worked out rather fine. Now, what do you think? Can you answer those questions? Just give it a try.
Cuando pensamos en vídeos alojados en internet, lo primero que se nos viene a la cabeza es YouTube. La página y la empresa asociada (ahora propiedad de Alphabet-Google) tan solo lleva 15 años en línea, pero es parte indispensable del uso que hacemos del internet. Según Alexa Internet"> es la segunda página más visitada en internet; la primera es Google. Visto que la única página con más usuarios es una máquina de búsqueda que a menudo se usa para buscar vídeos que terminan encontrándose en YouTube, cabe decir que es la página de contenidos más popular del internet.
El volumen de tráfico que genera es impresionante. No dispongo de datos sobre 2020 (y tenemos que tomar por hecho que la pandemia no precisamente disminuyó ni el volumen de vídeos subidos ni el de vídeos vistos), pero sí de 2019. En el primer trimestre 2019, YouTube llegó a 2.000.000.000, dos mil millones, de espectadores al mesdos mil millones, de espectadores al mes. En el mismo periodo, se subían 82.2 días de contenido en vídeos diariamente y se veían, a lo largo del trimestre 1/2019, 722.000.000 horas de vídeos (Tubefilter). Decir que la plataforma es bastante popular, por lo tanto, es decir muy poco.
Contenidos
Con tal volumen de vídeos (incluyendo a aquellos que son audio más imagen, bastante común especialmente en el ámbito de la música), está claro que generalizar no tiene mucho sentido. YouTube tiene unas Content Guidelines que regulan qué se puede monetizar o no, y qué se puede publicar o no. En cuanto a la monetización hay que añadir que muchos creadores no están muy contentos no están muy contentos: a menudo resultan un tanto imprevisibles o poco lógicas las actuaciones de la empresa en cuanto a sus decisiones. Un ejemplo es la manera de tratar la pandemia del covid: existe una guía sobre cómo tratar el tema, pero multitud de creadores se quejan de cómo se aplica. Reza dicha guía:
[18:14 UTC 2 April 2020] Monetizing COVID-19-related content: We’ve expanded monetization of content mentioning or featuring COVID-19 to all creators and news organizations. As always, content must follow both Advertiser-Friendly and Community Guidelines.
La última frase, relativa a las guías relativas a la publicidad y a la comunidad, parecen haber motivado a los algoritmos y a los controladores de YouTube a desmonetizar primero, preguntar luego. Problemas parecidos se mencionan, a menudo, por parte de canales de índole político, como The Hated One.
Sin embargo, la variedad de contenidos en YouTube sigue siendo tremenda; mientras hay limitaciones en cuanto a la duración de los vídeos las mismas se puede decir que apenas importan ya que se pueden subir tanto vídeos de menos de un minuto como de varias horas.
Publicidad y Analítica
Claro, YouTube también es una empresa. Una empresa que gana mucho dinero. En 2019 Alphabet publicó por primera vez los beneficios de la plataforma: 15,000 millones de dólares. No es sólo la plataforma como tal que mueve cantidades de dinero considerables:
While YouTube's revenue-sharing "Partner Program" made it possible to earn a substantial living as a video producer—its top five hundred partners each earning more than $100,000 annually and its ten highest-earning channels grossing from $2.5 million to $12 million —in 2012 CMU business editor characterized YouTube as "a free-to-use ... promotional platform for the music labels..
En una plataforma en la que tanto el alojamiento como la visualización son gratuitos (recientemente se introdujeron algunos servicios de pago), resulta obvia la pregunta de de dónde proviene tanto dinero. La respuesta corta es la publicidad. Ya en el apartado anterior se menció la palabra "Advertiser-Friendly" -la guía relevante es bastante extensa; de nuevo es aplicable lo dicho acerca de la posibilidad de desmonetización.
Esto por el lado del creador -¿qué se puede decir acerca del lado del espectador? Pues, principalmente que YouTube recoge muchos datos, incluídos datos acerca de la ubicación, de la edad, del género, de la historia de visualizaciones y búsquedas, del tipo y sistema operativo del aparato utilizado, etc. Mientras un creador tiene a su disposición sólo parte de estos datos, la empresa se queda con todos -y los tiene de propiedad. Para su venta sí los anonimiza -pero es posible deducir mucho de datos anonimizados si se contrastan. Para ver cómo, y qué se puede hacer con los datos vendidos por YouTube, se recomienda leer, por ejemplo, esta disertación, A Robust Framework for Mining YouTube Data de Zifeng Tian.
Desde el punto de vista de un profetuber, hay que reconocer que tal volumen de datos es excesivo -desde nuestro punto de vista un vídeo es una herramienta didáctica, no embalaje para publicidad, ni fuente de datos personales comercialmente monetizables.
Compartición de vídeos
Compartir vídeos alojados en YouTube es fácil: según contexto de utilización se puede compartir la URL de la página de reproducción, la URL del vídeo mismo, o un iframe generado automáticamente y modificable. Las dos últimas opciones son disponibles mediante clic secundario en el reproductor mismo. También existe un botón debajo del reproductor que incluye más opciones, desde las redes sociales más comunes en cada región geográfica (aparte de Facebook y Twitter, por ejemplo, en España se puede compartir directamente en Tuenti).
A la hora de subir un vídeo, el creador tiene la opción de activar o no la posibilidad de embeber el vídeo. Del mismo modo, también existen tres niveles de acceso: un vídeo puede ser Privado (visible para personas específicas, identificadas por su identidad de YouTube), Unlisted ('Oculto', invisible a la búsqueda, visualizable con el enlace correcto), o Público (sin restricciones).
Un punto muy a favor de utilizar YouTube en la labor docente es que es una de muy pocas plataformas compatibles con herramientas de creación de materiales didácticos como eXeLearning. Mientras dicha aplicación permite iframes de toda fuente segura (incluye vídeos alojados en nubes personales si se comparten adecuadamente), herramientas específicas dentro de ella (Quext, VideoQuext, Vídeo Interactivo...) son más restrictivos por razones prácticas. Existe, sin embargo, la posibilidad de cambio en este tema.
Analítica por parte del creador
La oferta de analítica por parte del creador que oferta YouTube es muy ámplia; ya se expuso más arriba, en el contexto de la publicidad. YouTube está optimizado para beneficiar a la publicidad, y la amplia oferta de herramientas analíticas lo demuestra. La imagen muestra la vista de analítica en un vídeo de mi canal. De nuevo cabe decir que desde un punto de vista de un profetuber puede parecer excesiva tal cantidad de datos acerca de los espectadores. Para un creador que pretenda vivir de sus vídeos será bien diferente.
Otras características y conclusiones
YouTube es una plataforma comercial basada en la publicidad y en la venta de datos de los usuarios. Como siempre cuando un producto digital comercial se ofrece gratuitamente, resulta que la mercamcía son los usuarios.
Sin embargo, YouTube tiene tres grandes ventajas sobre plataformas alternativas como LBRY: Para empezar es muy fácil de usar, sin sistemas de pago relevantes para quienes no tengan muchos suscritores y visualizaciones. Los dos primeros vídeos (más arriba) explican el proceso de crear un canal y subir un vídeo.
La segunda gran ventaja de YouTube es su familiaridad: Podemos dar por hecho que, por lo menos en Secundaria, el alumnado conozca la plataforma.
Por último, la integración de YouTube con otras herramientas, no sólo de Alphabet (Google Classroom, Blogger...), sino también con plataformas como Moodle o herramientas de creación como eXeLearning es casi impecable.
En conclusión, YouTube, por el momento, parece que sea la plataforma más indicada para las necesidades de un profetuber. Sin embargo, la privacidad y la seguridad de los datos de nuestro alumnado han de tomar un papel central en todo lo que hagamos -incluso más en esta plataforma que en otras.
Sunday, 8 November 2020
Analysing the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats Involved in Making Videos
When you do something that requires a lot of effort, it tends to be convenient to analyse what you're doing, taking a look at your own strengths and weaknesses as well as the opportunities and threats inherent in your environment. Why? Well, you may aim too high and burn out by trying to do something you're not yet up to. You can avoid that not by abandoning (that would be an extreme case), but by using your strengths to overcome your weaknesses. Sometimes you may even find a way to turn your weaknesses into strengths -kind of like aikido.
As for opportunities and threats (I find the latter word a bit too strong, but it's the conventional way to phrase it), it's basically the same. Opportunities are those things in our environment that we tend to encourage what we're doing, while Threats are those that, unless ameliorated, neutralised, or used against themselves (aikido again) may end up converting your endeavour into a wild-goose chase. Like, for instance, expending a lot of energy making videos for students who don't have access to the internet.
For my own case, I've made the following analysis:
On the whole, the conclusion I draw from my analysis is that I definitely ought to go on working on this whole YouTube/videos thing. The Strengths and Opportunities outweigh the Weaknesses and Threats, I'd say.
Still, just confirming or not what you're doing isn't really what this kind of analysis is all about, is it? The important thing is to take all this and turn it into Tasks. Thinking about it, I came up with the following:
Tasks
Find a way to increase my efficiency in producing videos.
Design attractive and useful projects to carry out with students for them to make their own videos.
Keep a close watch on the level. This may mean making use of the teleprompter more often -it's easier to monitor the language in a written script.
Adhere to the KISS acronym: Keep It Short and Simple.
So, I basically know what I need to do now. Let's go and do it!
Saturday, 31 October 2020
Some Reflections on Educational Videos
The quest to combine beauty and the didactic
I don't know who it was who said, ''the didactic is often the enemy of beauty,' and I can't seem to find the quote anywhere. Which, given the ubiquity of quote memes on the interwebs, might seem surprising.
And yet, there is something to that statement: too often, the didactic seems drab, uninteresting, boring. A story told to teach a lesson more often than not is not worth reading.
But there are also examples of the opposite: "It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank...," begins one of the beautiful passages ever written in English prose, and Darwin most certainly is out to teach us a lesson.
Beauty and learning are both their own rewards, so learning should be beautiful.
Obviously, beauty in the teaching/learning process also has a strategic part to play: motivation is the buzzword here. We learn more if we enjoy what we do, and as a teacher creating things both pretty and useful is also more rewarding.
The educational video is a great way to achieve this fusion of beauty and usefulness: with a bit of creativity (and, certainly, some technical and methodological know-how) it's actually fairly easy to make engaging materials: videos that are fun to watch, that make you want more of the same. Things of beauty, in a word, but things of beauty that teach.
Additionally, we ought not to forget that today's culture is very much an audiovisual one. Young folks today are used to getting their information in an audiovisual format -on demand, in small and tasty bites, accompanied by some background music and in full colour. This, and video games.
As teachers, we need to take all this into account. The educational video most certainly cannot replace other, more traditional, forms of teaching, but it can enrich what we do -and thus, enrich our students.
And it doesn't stop there, either: we learn more from what we see than from what we read, but nothing teaches us as much as teaching itself. What if we taught our students to teach each other? Having them make educational videos themselves is a splendid way to do this: they can easily correct themselves, we as teachers can accompany them every step of the way, and they'll be learning how to use ICTs at the same time as they develop both their knowledge of the subject at hand and their abilities as communicators.
And finally, there are the purely pragmatic issues we've grown all-too accustomed to in this year of 2020: for the foreseeable future, we simply can't tell if we'll be able to see our students face-to-face during every class, and those that need to revise some more will have need for explanations we simply don't always time to give them. A video with its associated activities may go a long way under such conditions.
To conclude, being able to make educational videos is a highly useful skill for a teacher today, and being well-versed in the skills involved in doing so opens up new horizons in methodology -and self-realisation.
If you haven't done it yet, give it a go. You just might find it's fun as well. If, like myself, you're a teacher in Extremadura, Spain, you're likely to have the tools at hand -the computers and broadband connection at school, the radio shack (if there isn't one at your school, why don't you start a RadioEdu program?), and so on. A digital whiteboard can easily become a cinema screen, but you already knew that.
The one issue, sadly, will be the lack of decent connections and hardware in some of your students' homes. At my own school, there are those that have no internet, or no computer, at home. But the school can help -if YOU make it clear that that's what needs to be done.
Sequoyah (c. 1770 - c. 1843) was a tribal leader of the Cherokee people. But, while he was also a statesman, he is best remembered for having invented the Cherokee syllabary, the first Native American writing system.
Join us on a journey through his life and times.
"American Lives: Sequoyah" is the first video in a series produced by 3rd ESO Bilingual at Sta Lucía del Trampal Secondary School in Alcuéscar, Spain. Stay tuned to this space to see more, and check out our school's English channel to see more.
YouTube won't allow comments on videos made for kids such as this one, but feel free to post here.
