Using videos in the language classroom is one way of getting authentic language to the students. In most cases, students can have access to your video activities via prepared video activities and flipped lessons in the classroom or at home, so accessibility is a strong feature and advantage when using videos.
Some suggested teaching ideas for video activities
Videos can be used at any stage of the teaching and learning process. For languages, videos can be a great way to introduce, revise and review vocabulary, sentence patterns and language concepts. With some of the products below, you can create and design video activities to also be formative and summative activities. Following are a few suggested activities how I have used videos in the classroom.
Flipped Lessons: Flipped lessons have been around for ages and similar to the collaborative group work idea, students can work not only in groups but also on their own. The great thing about flipped lessons and using videos is that students can go over the material as many times as they need to master the content. So for example, if they have missed a lesson, they can catch up on their own, take notes and discuss the content with the teacher.
To view some of my flipped lessons, please go to my Narralakes Youtube channel.
Educanon
Educanon is a free web based product that is a powerful tool for any teacher. You can create your classes or student lists easily by copying and pasting your lists or adding them in manually. The Educanon dashboard is neat and easy to navigate and the functions below should help you get started.
Creating: The teacher can create an activity via the Design page. Look for a video or upload your own from a wide range of web based sources, such as Vimeo, Youtube, and the Khan Academy, just to mention a few. Once you have found your video, past the url in the finder, Educanon finds the video and then you can start adding activities. You can add questions and crop the video if you only want to use parts of it.
Assigning: Once you have created your video activity, you can assign a class from your list.
Sharing: The great thing with Educanon is that you can share it with students or anyone via Twitter, email or Facebook with the url code or embed it into your web page.
Bulbs: Bulbs are basically your storage area for your videos and then assign classes or students to them, creating the "bulb" . You can store the videos you have worked on and created or find new videos.
Monitor: Another great feature of Educanon is that you can monitor your students, this is great for formative or summative assessments and as with most good products, grades can be exported and saved.
Overall, I find Educanon an excellent product. The free version has most of the functions that any class teacher would need, not many of us would have more than 8 classes. If you do need feel you need the extra functions the Basic version does not provide, the Premium and Blended School versions come at a reasonable price.
Here's an example of part of one of my Educanon videos.
Check out my video resource list at Pinterest. Follow Ken's board Videos on Pinterest.
