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.
