| What are
the teaching and learning advantages of using digital video?
Despite 50 years of technological
advance, the exercise book full of hand written words and
the occasional pencil drawn diagram, is still the most
important expression of student learning in schools all over
the world. Doing 'well' in History, whether in 1950 or
in the year 2000, is still largely calculated by how well
the student performs within the artificial constraints of
the lines of the traditional exercise book. The problem with
this should be obvious: assessment of student work is
neither relevant or fair. It is not relevant because the
skills required to succeed in an exercise book classroom no
longer resemble the skills required by a multimedia 'real
world'. It is not fair because exercise book assessment
privileges 'traditional' linguistic learning styles at the
expense of non-linguistic learning styles. Children whose
learning strengths are dramatic, musical or kinesthetic find
precious few opportunities to shine.
Teachers (and students) are often reluctant to invest time
and effort in a role-play activity, class debates and
student presentations because the audience is small and the
assessable evidence ephemeral. Apart from the memory of the
classroom audience there is often no record of a student's
success. With a digital video camera all this changes.
Not only is the evidence easy to record, more importantly,
it is easy to copy and transfer. This transferability
enables both the student and teacher to build up 'learning
portfolios' which can be a much more authentic record of the
'multiple intelligences' of learning. Students who are good
linguistic learners are not necessarily good performers in
front of a live audience and vice versa. Traditional paper
and pencil assessment cannot always accredit the student
whose strengths are kinesthetic or spatial. Multimedia
learning portfolios can
(For more on this see: The
Laptop Revolution)
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