T21-4 Stimulus

Digital Video in the Classroom

If you mention video and the Internet, today's students will no doubt think of YouTube. In the early days of YouTube, many schools were afraid of it and blocked it because of concerns over inappropriate content and the cost of exceeding download quotas. Other video sharing services have sprung up, some with the specific goal of sharing educational videos. Internet quotas have typically increased to the point where the cost argument is not such an issue. However, the most significant change is in the volume and variety of video material available online.


These two articles highlight the dilemma facing schools today.
Cardine, S. (2008) Is Education Ready For YouTube? Converge Magazine.
Columbia Talk (2009) Is YouTube Educational?
There are many other video sites on the Internet as you will see in this week's Integration section.
Some years ago, learning objects were proposed as the way forward in using multimedia in education. A learning object was loosely defined as a digital object that supported learning. The idea was that these resources would be reusable and lessons or parts of lessons would be built around them. The next article provides a brief description of learning objects and this is followed by an abstract from a research report into the effectiveness of their use.
Riley, F (2009) RLO Frequently Asked Questions. Nottingham University

Kay, R.  Knaack, L. and  Muirhead, B. (2009) A Formative Analysis of Instructional Strategies for Using Learning Objects (Abstract only)

Beyond Consuming

There is no doubt that using quality multimedia resources such as video can help students learn. Using video clips to illustrate particular points or to stimulate discussion is a valid classroom strategy. However, progressive educators are proposing that we go beyond this consumer mode of learning. Digital storytelling is one way of doing this by combining concepts of project based learning with the use of multimedia tools to produce a multimedia story.

Girard, L. (2009) Digital Storytelling: How Will it Impact My Future Students. This is a short Slideshare presentation. If you are not familiar with Slideshare, you might like to explore it a bit more. Laura Girard's presentation has no audio, but Slideshare also supports presentation with audio.

The Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling, from the University of Houston, is a website that provides almost a one-stop for getting started with digital storytelling. Read the front page and watch the video provided on the page. Please explore this site and read a good sampling of the resources from the Essentials menu.
This site is unavailable at the moment. I hope this is only temporary because it is a good site. if you don't have any luck try this presentation.

Porter, B. (n.d.) The Art of Digital Storytelling. Part 1: Become a 21st Century StoryKeeper and Digital Storytelling Across the Curriculum Part 2: Find content’s deeper meaning.Read these two shot articles.