EDU 642 Week 5: Reflection of Videos

Technologies in the Classroom

When I think about using all of the different technologies available to students, at first it gets a little overwhelming. There are so many resources that I know my students would love and benefit from. Especially after reading last weeks’ material about creativity in the classroom and from looking over all of the resources and websites available to create, edit, present, etc. However, I do think it is critical for us as teachers to make sure that we are picking technology resources that are the most beneficial for students and to make sure that we are trying them out ourselves and evaluating them before putting them in the hands of our students. This will make sure that we not only don’t waste our time giving our students work that is not impactful, but I also think it is easy to overwhelm our students with too many technology resources and materials. I feel like it is trying to balance a fine line of adding in technology resources enough to keep students engaged, but not too many that they give up and get frustrated learning each new tech tool.

Artifact Creation

After reflecting on the artifacts that I created this week, I think that I created some videos that will be useful to my students and are different from the normal for them. I tried to go outside of my comfort zone for creating videos because I had mostly just stuck to creating Google Slides and voice them and explaining for our video recording lessons. For these products, I wanted to expand my creativity and use some tools and programs that I haven’t used before. I ended up creating a video with Adobe Spark and a video from My Simpleshow. I ultimately had an easier time with Adobe Spark than with My Simpleshow, but I think both turned out great. I liked the ease of use when using Adobe Spark, it was easy to narrate my voice for each slide and it was easy to add in text and pictures. However, I did feel like there weren’t many options on slide format, it was pretty similar throughout, but this helped keep my video presentation uniform and easy to follow along. When I used My SimpleShow, I had a little harder time with it because I had not used it before, but I wanted to get away from the slide deck presentation that I had always done in the past. I had to create the entire script for the video and replace out different images. Then I ultimately had to download the video and voice it over myself because the only free voice option was a robotic voice and I wanted it to sound more personal and natural for my students. Overall, I was happy with how both of my video creations turned out. I would definitely like to use Adobe Spark videos again because it was easy to create and something different than Google Slides. I also enjoyed My SimpleShow because it was different than the normal slides and I think some of my more visual students would enjoy them, however, it does take much longer to plan and create the video because I had to create the entire script and then go through and change out the images that I didn’t like and add ones that I thought were necessary to the video.

Some design principles that I made sure to utilize in my video creations included Mayer’s coherence principle. I wanted to make sure that my videos focused on the content that I wanted my students to know, therefore, I made sure to minimize any unnecessary media or text. I also made sure to get right to the point in my narration of my videos. Another principle that stuck out to me while I was creating the videos was the image principle. Usually in my videos that I create for my students, I have a webcam image of me in the corner so students can see my face, but in these videos, I wanted to eliminate distractions and I think it does help students stay focused on the content being presented and not me. One thing that I did notice between my two videos is the difference in text and media use in both. In the video that I created with Adobe Spark, I wrote most of the text on screen because I wanted my students to focus on my writing and my sentences, where my other video did not have as much text because I wanted them to focus on the strategy. Therefore, I used more graphics instead of text in that video.

Artifact Plans

I plan to use the videos that I found and evaluated in both social studies and for a reading lesson. The social studies immigration video will be especially helpful because our curriculum doesn’t give many resources on information that my students have to learn and the video I found does a great job of summarizing it up in a way that is interesting and engaging to my learners. I plan to post this as a Google Classroom assignment with the video and the activity for my students to do after. Ideally, this lesson would be best done in the classroom where we could have more of a conversation about the artifacts. The second video that I evaluated on point of view will also be used as a Google Classroom assignment where I assign the video for students to watch and then complete the digital activity on point of view. The two videos that I created will both be used for writing lessons. The Oreo video will be used to show my students how to write a quick opinion paragraph and then students will need to write their own opinion paragraph from a prompt. I will most likely assign this to them to watch and have them practice by writing their own opinion paragraph using what they learned from the video. The last video that I created was on word choice. This will be used as part of one of our mini lessons for our persuasive writing pieces. Students will need to watch the video, then they will go back through their own writing and change out boring words to more interesting words.

Reflections

When reflecting on my learning this week, I know that I learned more about video tools that will improve my video lessons. I also explored some new video creation tools that I would like to start using more in the future rather than just Google Slides presentations. Initially, I probably spent too much time looking for different online presentations tools, it was so easy to get lost in them! But I am happy that I found a few new ones and was able to explore those. Evaluating the videos helped me gain more knowledge in what to look for in an online resource, whether that be a video or a podcast or even a website. I know that I will start to think about these factors as I am looking for more resources for my students in the future.