Anna Whitcher’s webinar Putting Students in the Director’s Chair looked at the practicalities of how teachers can use video creation as an engaging classroom project. Here, Ceri Jones explores this further – looking at how the video project can maximise language use and practice, while making the most of our students’ knowledge and experience as digital video consumers.
Ceri began by introducing how the video project can be scaffolded, and recommends referring to the Students in the Director’s Chair project pack for practical lesson plans on how to run the video creation project in class. In her webinar she explains how the video ‘creation’ is an important part of the process, but seeks to highlight how the videos can become a fantastic reason and opportunity to exploit language learning too.
She sets out how this can be applied to the three-part process:
Step 1: Modelling
Modelling involves thinking about the video genres students are interested in and watching regularly. This may include vlogs, challenge tasks, how-to tutorials. These are the types of non-professional, low-production video genres students can model their videos on as they will be very familiar with them.
To generate language practice around this, students could create hashtags for the videos they watch/make e.g. for a how-to recipe video: ‘#yummy’ ‘#recipe’, ‘#favouritefood’ or they could practise writing comments to be left in response to someone’s video on YouTube: ‘I loved your video! It was really easy to follow. And it looks delicious!’
Step 2: Preparation & Creation
Ceri goes on to suggest some practical ideas to help students generate specific topic-ideas for their videos, particularly around the theme of exploring culture and where they are from e.g. a traditional food dish/recipe, interesting places nearby, or local events. The dual-purpose of this stage is teachers helping students to explore language, particularly around digital literacy. Examples include getting students to identify the types of roles involved with filming a video (e.g. director, editor, producer), and the types of technical equipment and software that needs to be used.
Step 3: Feedback & exploitation
Once the videos have been created, step 3 involves teachers getting evidence of the language learning and usage that has been going on throughout the project. Ceri sets out practical ways that students can use language to introduce, discuss and respond to each other’s videos.
To watch Ceri’s webinar in full, press play on the video below.
Make sure to check out the Students in the Director’s Chair project pack in full written by Eyes Open and Uncover authors Ben Goldstein & Ceri Jones.