Video in the Classroom

Video has become an amazing tool in today's society. Not only can we watch movies play out on the big screen or watch our favorite sitcom on our TVs and computers; everyday citizens can shoot videos of any capacity and post to the web for an extremely vast audience to view. It is so amazing how much information is at our fingertips on any given day.

It seems that although these tools are fairly easily accessible, some schools are apprehensive about incorporating video into their classrooms. I know that in past classes, creating a video would have been a much more effective way of conducting a school project. For instance, my consumer behavior class was assigned a group project of determining how a new business would fair economically in our community. My group chose Starbucks (in North Dakota, they are few and far between, but we had heard rumor of plans were being made to bring one in.) We conducted interviews of fellow university students as well as residents of the community on their feelings of bringing Starbucks into the area. (Did they plan to be a patron? How did they feel about price points? etc.) We conducted extensive research on how well the company favored in regions similar to ours with the same economical climate. We also tried to determine the most prime location for the establishment. Everyone in the group worked extremely hard on the project, but At the end of the almost 2 month process we were only required to give a 15 minute presentation on our findings. If we would have been allowed to use video to show what we had done, it would have been a much more effective way to convey our message to our professor and fellow classmates. Not only that, but we would have also been able to upload our video to a video sharing site such as YouTube so that those in our community would have been able to see the results of our research.

I think there are so many ways that video can be used in the classroom. One of my sister's friends who is a teacher back home has developed a weekly classroom news project for her students. Each week, a group of four students works together to report the news in their classroom using video. They create the script, they act as the reporters, and they edit the footage to be presented to the class. The group reports on weather, current events, and sports. At the end of the week, the video the students have created is shown to the class (and sometimes the entire school depending on the content). The students don't spend a great deal of time on the project, but it gives them the opportunity to experience someting different and exciting in the classroom. I really like this idea because it enables the students improve on their communication skills, practice teamwork, and gives them the opportunity to express themselves while relaying relevant information all through the use of technology.