| But it is the use of digital video and video
editing software that is the key to this activity. Teachers
(and students) are often reluctant to invest time and effort
in a role-play activity, 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. (For further examples on this see Student
Websites as Learning Portfolios) 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: Richard Jones-Nerzic The
Laptop Revolution)
The Activity
In a follow-up activity to the textbook
investigation into child labour in the 19th century, Year
9 historians also undertook a major online empathetic
role-play activity. There were three stages to this
assignment:
(i) The students accessed the Spartacus
Education online activity and following the
instructions, researched the
life of one person in the 19th century who was involved in
some way with child labour.
(ii) Using the views of their chosen character they wrote a
one minute speech either attacking or defending the practice
of child labour. They were then expected to perform the
speech as a role-play and encouraged to wear clothes more
appropriate to the 19th century rather than the 21st!
(iii) In pairs they used a digital video camera to record
their speech and then (if necessary) edited and compressed
their role-play using video editing software. This enabled
their work to be run on a website. |
