Students Communicating through Digital Video

Students can communicate with their teachers, fellow students, families, communities, and the world through videos they create. Here are some types of students-created videos that can enact instructional goals:

Instructional Purpose: Demonstrate knowledge/understanding or skill acquisition; demonstrate synthesis and application of knowledge/understanding.
Video types:
• Documentary/informational
• News-style reports
• Animations/stop-motion
• How-to/simulated teaching
• Advertisements/infomercials/book trailers
• Screencasts
• Music videos

Instructional Purpose: Serve as a creative work.
Video types:
• Digital story
• Screenplay
• Set up a context for a problem to be solved/challenge/inquiry
• Story problem
• Unsolved mystery

Instructional Purpose: Collect visual/audio data for observations or analysis or to document events.
Video types:
• Interviews
• Landmarks/geographic features
• Natural objects or events
• Music, dance, drama, or readings
• Athletic skills
• Vocational skills

Learn more about communicating with digital video in Teaching with Digital Video: Watch, Analyze, Create (ISTE)

Video that Communicates

Educational video that best communicates to students must be brief, interesting, and mentally stimulating. It should promote student engagement or analysis or knowledge acquisition/retention or skill acquisition or conceptual understanding or critical thinking. Picture and sound quality need to be clear, the subject must be large enough to see well with few extraneous visual distractions, and the components of the action need to be accessible in order for viewers to make reliable interpretations (especially for viewers with limited prior knowledge).  Most importantly, the videos you show in your classroom should be connected to the curriculum and closely matched to your instructional goal.