Welcome to my Professional Learning blog.
My name is Matt Nicoll and I am a high school teacher in New Zealand, interested in improving the classroom experience for my students. I am open to trialing new approaches and hope to use this blog to reflect on my ideas and practices.

Monday 15 October 2012

Filming - First Attempt

My Year 12 Chemistry class are a pretty cooperative bunch. When I explained what I wanted, they jumped at the idea of filming me.

The lesson followed this sequence (after I explained about why I wanted the teaching moments to be filmed):

  1. Explain the task (and link to the upcoming assessment expectations).
    • there were a variety of oxidants and reductants available
    • students were to try different combinations of these and record any changes they observed
    • for any reactions (changes), students were to infer what the products were
    • write half equations and a balanced overall equation for any reactions which did occur
  2. Demonstrate a possible combination of chemicals(experiment)
  3. The students were left to carry out the experiment throughout the remainder of the lesson.


Here are the two videos we captured:
Explaining the Lesson/Task

Demonstrating one Possible Experiment

After these were captured, I uploaded them to YouTube. I got this set up while the students were getting their respective equipment for the experiment; this allowed me to move around the lab and help students while the video uploaded.
The biggest issue I found was that I then had to use part of the following lesson to organise these videos on YouTube and email the embed code to the students. I am going to need to find a much more efficient way to share with them!!
Currently, I am thinking that I should embed the videos into our Class Site on Moodle. This will still take time, but it will avoid me having to send out group emails.
Alternatively, I could task one student per lesson to upload the video, then embed it into a Class Blog. Ideas please...!!!

1 comment:

  1. Maybe a suggestion involving myportfolio here Matt:
    Once you have organised your 12Chem class into a myportfolio group, either post the link to the video in the Group forum or create a group page where you can keep adding the links (or drag a Embed external media block on the page to display the videos) as you create them.
    Students who are in the group receive notification of the forum post or know where to get the link from on the Group page.
    Also students as group members can all edit the page: so they can take it in turns to do that.

    ReplyDelete