Monday, January 25, 2010

ACT Writing Lesson Video

I almost forgot to post this video to my blog.  I felt that the juniors need something to lock onto after they leave the classroom, so I made the ACT Argumentative Writing Video for them to review at their leisure.
I did find recently find that Blip.tv is a much better tool for posting videos because their are no length or file size limitations.  In addition, Blip.tv does not allow the school inappropriate content that YouTube allows.  For future videos, I will be utilizing Blip.tv

Thursday, January 21, 2010

YouTube Lesson

The logic was that I was not going to be at school, and I wanted to cover an Introduction to Argumentative Writing lesson with the English class.  I used CamStudio to record a narrated PowerPoint presentation that I would have presented if I were there.  I posted the video to YouTube and embedded it in Mr. Langley's Digital Classroom in the Video Lessons page with specific instructions about how to connect up a laptop to both the projector and the auxiliary cable running to the stereo.   I felt pretty good that I would not "lose" a day because I couldn't be there.  Unfortunately, the sub accidentally bypassed that part of the lesson, for whatever reason - I'm assuming that it was because she was nervous (from what the class relayed to me).  Anyway, I assigned the video for homework after I found that the class did not know what I was talking about when I started discussing the next step of argumentative writing.  Following is the video:

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Posting YouTube videos to Mr. Langley's Digital Classroom

I have found YouTube to be a great tool for video storage/playback when you couple it with the embed video functionality of websites.  The English students and speech students have been assigned projects that involved videos, both sets of projects were finalized before Christmas break.  I was able to catch up this week and upload the videos to YouTube and embed them in Mr. Langley's Digital Classroom.  Currently, the speech class project videos are all lumped onto one page of the site . . . I am contemplating creating individual pages for each student as I have done for the English classes.  Each English student has his/her video embedded in his/her page of Mr. Langley's Digital Classroom.

One of my key concerns in uploading the videos to YouTube was the possibility of negative, inappropriate, or hurtful comments that may be posted under the videos on YouTube.  I was relieved to find that I can turn off the comments and video reply comments, therefore eliminating that possibility.  Most, if not all, of the traffic to the student videos will be through Mr. Langley's Digital Classroom.  However, because there is that slim possibility that someone from the general web public can stumble upon the videos, I feel comfortable knowing that the videos may only be viewed and not commented upon.

Because I do feel the students deserve some form of public feedback on their work, I opted to permit the ability of YouTube viewers to rate the videos (one to five stars).  That rating can be interpreted in a general sense by the students and should lead to an increase in quality for the next project as the students try to create a product that will gain more stars than the previous one.