Week 6

EDU800 Week 6 Supplemental Annotation

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Using video in teacher education

Brophy, J. E. & Gamoran Sherin, M. (2004). Using video in teacher education. Chapter 1:  NEW PERSPECTIVES ON THE ROLE OF VIDEO IN TEACHER EDUCATION, Amsterdam: JAI.

This article first gives a historical perspective over the past 40 years of the role that video has played in teacher education, and how video affords teacher training and education, examines the effectiveness of using video for teacher learning, with some mixed results.  It shows how video can be an innovative way to teach teachers to teach, and to develop teachers professionally.  The historical background shows the evolution of capability of analog video of the past, to digitized video currently, to deployment of it via the Internet in what the author calls video networks.  The author points out that as video costs continue to go down, it is more accessible and useful both in real and virtual classrooms and for use in teacher professional development.  It helps to provide an alternative to live environments and may contribute to teacher motivation. It also outlines various uses for video in teacher education such as using it to teach at a scaled-down, micro-level, or “Microteaching”  where the class size or duration was smaller and needed different instructional strategies.  Microteaching provides new opportunities for teachers to conduct whole-class discussions, and became a standard way to deliver teacher education.  Another technique used in teacher education is interaction analysis, or lesson analysis, where teachers used video to observe and analyze student-teacher interactions.   In addition, video can be used to model expert teaching, enabling developing teachers to examine how more experienced  teachers think instead of just observing their behavior.  In additon, the article provided a number of ways to leverage video for student learning.  Such things included video-based cases, including narratives, analysis and subsequent discussions which provided novice teachers with rich instances of problems to decipher and solve within the classroom environment.  In addition, the article refers to the integration of video into hypermedia, enabling the video to be delivered in a more intuitive manner, paralleling the ways in which people think.  Another key point is how the author states that video is an immutable/unchangeble, lasting and permanent record, which can be viewed and reviewed many times, relieving the teacher from having to remember everything which happened in a scenario

This chapter is an interesting account of how video, now predominantly digital, can be used not only to teach students, but to teach teachers.  Because of the flexibility of video embedded in hypermedia or delivered through the Internet, this technology has a far reaching effect.  Video is a powerful medium and now as it is carried on networks, captured in so many settings and environments, it is a key way to learn.  Video also can provide a clear account of the classroom environment for study, as well as content-based instruction.  It shows that video, by modeling expert teaching scenario’s to newer teachers, can be an effective way to empower teachers in training to emulate and replicate good teaching practices.  Novice teachers can learn new strategies to become better pedagogists.  The use of these video-based strategies could lead to innovative new techniques since they allow building off of rich examples, leveraging and scaffolding to higher value and more effective techniques.  And, the analysis and review of mentor teacher examples can give the novice teacher ways to become expert teachers, through reflection and discussion and through practical implementation of these strategies.  It can allow the developing teacher to observer and analyze student interactions and classroom practices.

Video can play a great role in educational research, learning science and the study of educational technology, and should be a key part of the suite of media and data sources we use for research.  Since researchers are by nature teachers, using video for teaching teachers is instructive for researchers to use video for research.  This article provides a perspective on seeing how video has been used, is now used and can be used in the future for teaching purposes to both teacher/learners and students.  Since video is a permanent record of events and occurrences of teaching and learning situations, researchers can use it as a focused study aid and tool for doing research.  It can be used for data gathering of the sort which defies just quantitative data and qualitative data through interviews and the like.  Through having a video record, new systems and approaches can be invented to perform research with video-based data.  In addition, since new technologies for searching image and video content are being developed by Google and others, this article will serve as a reminder of where we came from in terms of using video for basic training purposes, to video becoming a major source of research studies.

 

EDU800 Week 6 Annotation

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Schwartz, D. L., & Hartman, K. (2007). It is not television anymore: Designing digital video for learning and assessment. In Goldman, R., Pea, R., Barron, B., & Derry, S.J. (Eds.), Video research in learning science (pp. 349-366). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrance Erlbaum Associates.

This article explores how designed video technology can be a powerful factor in learning, and how it can be embedded in multimedia environments.   It also gives suggestions for educational researchers and instructional designers to use video for assessment.  It provides a framework for using video in multimedia contexts and describes how different genres of video can support different types of learning.   It outlines four common learning outcomes of utilizing video for learning:  (1) Seeing, in which video enables students to see things they haven’t seen in person, and gives opportunities to have the learner to leverage the visual medium to absorb large amounts of information without the logistical challenges and dilemmas that verbal only content presentation (i.e. text) provides.  (2) Engaging, in which the video can help to draw a learner in and keep them involved, providing a cognitive context leveraging the visual senses.  The authors also compare how video exploits the extrinsic and intrinsic motivations to learn, emphasizing how learning is inherently intrinsic, but the extrinsic value of absorbing an engaging video event can contribute to engagement.  It also gives opportunities for learners to leverage prior knowledge, providing an anchor to build meaning from future learning experiences.  (3) Doing, in which models of skills and behaviors desired by the learner, can be visually rendered and/or simulated.  The student’s attitude is affected and skills can be acquired through viewing, emulating and practicing these models.  As the learner builds on previous knowledge through these models, how their knowledge, skills and capability matures can be assessed dynamically.  (4) Saying, in which students can verbalize what they’ve learned from the video, demonstrating the effectiveness of new knowledge acquisition.  The learner’s ability to verbalize facts and explain their newly acquired knowledge can be assessed from.  The effectiveness of the knowledge transfer is much more pronounced when the learner has prior knowledge to decipher and decode what the video presents.

Video can be a powerful tool for the learning sciences, when designed well while providing content for learning activities, and for assessing their effectiveness.  For example, practitioners can embed video to support learning, whether it is newly designed and created or video from archival sources.  Video can be a very useful assessment tool, requiring the student to look at something, and to find out what knowledge was gleaned from the video learning experience.  It also generates different motivations for learners to prepare for and to engage in learning opportunities.  Video content as a learning strategy enables students to scaffold on skills and knowledge modeled in the video, leading to intellectual growth.   It can be useful for project-based learning, be the basis for collaborative activities, and used to trigger other types of content absorption while being a catalyst to synthesize multiple sources of information for knowledge acquisition.  Visual media has evolved and improved, and now there is exponential growth of digitized old and new digital video, the acceleration of learning through utilizing visual media will continue.  The systems, networks and processes that enable today’s proliferation of video will fuel further innovation in video learning.

This article provides foundational literature for an area in need of scholarly articles on digital video for instructional purposes.  It also presents ideas for teachers to incorporate video into their pedagogical activities, including using it independently for student learning, incorporating and embedding it into LMS shells and other multimedia content, and other instructional resources.  As an educational technology, researchers can utilize instances of designed video within the suite of multimedia technologies delivered and utilized for instructional and experimental purposes, because it provides learning opportunities that involves seeing, engaging, doing, and saying which establishes, compels, reinforces and forms the basis for assessment.  In addition, by understanding how learning can be enhanced and affected by digital video, we can continue to analyze, design and build systems for learning that are comprehensively inclusive of a combination of media including text, hypertext, audio, computer simulations and digital video.   As learning science evolves, we may find that incorporating multiple media in the learning process will lead to better outcomes, especially given the digital nature of the learning environments that are emerging.