Video Project

I thoroughly enjoyed every step of the video making process. This project touched on two of the most engaging elements of my personality, collaboration and creativity. The project mimicked one of the best experiences of my life, which was making an album with five other musicians in a professional-level studio.

I found that Mandy, Joe and I worked well with one another; bouncing various ideas off of each other at every step of the process and choosing the one that best suited our needs. We also exhibited, on several occasions, an ability to adapt quickly and modify our original plan to suit new situations.

I would say that we genuinely had a lot of fun working on this project over the entire course of the process. Because of the high level of fun we had as a group, this did not seem like work that we had to complete. Rather than a project, this felt like an activity.

Also, because we were able to choose our topic, we felt as though we had ownership over our work. I can say that I now feel that the results of this project are an accomplishment for myself and something of which I can be proud.

Ultimately, I feel as though I’ve not only learned a skill that I can apply professionally, but one that I can also apply personally as well. I plan to take on several video projects in the next few months not only for myself, but also for my band all the while honing my professional skills.

I feel that the question of whether video has a place in the classroom is rather moot since video has been proven to have educational value over the past several decades. The real question should be what is the value of video in the classroom produced by the teacher and/or the students?

As a tool for teaching students, teachers have a world of possibilities available to them thanks to video. Things that a teacher cannot do in real life standing in front of a class can be done in a video, thus possibly conveying a difficult concept in a new and more understandable way.

For students, a video project can be an extremely engaging way, much as it was for me, to provide them with ownership over a project and the make use of the Web 2.0, possibly. Students can create a video to accompany certain projects and then those videos can be shown to the class. The teacher could even adjust the class to be like an actual movie premier.

I think video could be applied for any language arts lesson in which students are all taking part in the same reading. Various scenes could be acted out to aid in student comprehension of the text, which would then be reinforced by subsequent screenings of the video. The most obvious challenge to such a project would be access to the necessary equipment to produce such a video. Second to this would be the students’ background knowledge of how to operate such equipment. This project could quickly turn into a project on creating a video and lose sight of the original essential question.