One of the best examples of using video for learning wasn’t from a teacher, but one of my mom friends. She didn’t have elementary lesson plans or set goals, but she used video the way teachers should for the most effective experience.
While she and her daughter were watching a television show, they talked about what they saw. They talked about letters and numbers and practiced the alphabet. After, she casually asked her daughter if she could count as high as the character in the show, and her daughter showed off by doing one better. The mom commented to me that she felt bad letting her child watch TV, and I looked at her like she was crazy. TV, when used right, is tremendously helpful to children’s learning. And she did it right.
This mom knew instinctively that video shouldn’t be passive, and that is really the key to meeting your objectives. You know what it feels like when you watch television at home: you kind of get this glaze in your eye; you sit and just wait for what is going to happen next. This is fine for home – and it’s nice to escape for an hour or two – but this is not a great use of your precious classroom minutes.
Teachers need to ensure that everyone – including themselves – is participating in the video. When you turn on the video, no one gets to turn off his brains. If this happens, your objectives will not be met, and you are just filling up time.
School videos can be an effective component of elementary lesson plans, and there are a variety of ways to engage students in active learning. Here are two tips:
- Watch a segment of the video without sound. This will force the students (force in a nice way, that is) to provide the narration. This can be such a great window into their thinking.
- Watch a segment without picture. The students have to visualize the content based on the narration. It is working different brain muscles, as it were.
I even threw in another important tip in here: segments. Five minutes of well-used video can be much more effective than 50 minutes. Research tells us that the average attention span for children is about one minute for each year of their lives. So, a seven year old will have a seven minute span. That doesn’t mean you can’t show longer videos; but you have to do something to spark that attention and engage the mind often. Here are some other great tips to get you started.