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In order to enhance students’ learning experience, Mr Thomas Low from Radin Mas Primary School recorded his lessons and even trained his Primary Five students to record their classmates’ presentations. As those involved soon realised, the benefits didn’t apply to only the students.
So what can video do? In short, EVERYTHING! Everything the novice video producer would want in a video can be included with enough planning, but the all-important human touch is still essential.
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| Filming their peers during
presentations allows students to be more involved with learning. |
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Mr Low implemented the use of video in various innovative ways: he recorded his lessons on video and trained his P5 students to record their peers presenting. As an enhancement to the learning experience, his recorded lessons are distributed to his students after a class, to reinforce the lesson that had just been taught.
The students download these lessons onto their thumb drive or CD-RW. The students can then view these lessons in their own time. Students also benefited when they view what they’ve recorded. They obtain feedback on how they can improve their communication skills.
First Seeds
When he first noticed that some students had difficulties understanding the more complex concepts, Mr Low came up with the idea of video teaching. After a review of his teaching strategies, he decided to address this issue by embarking on a project to capture lessons on tape and distribute them freely. Before the initial recording, Mr Low trained a few students in operating a video camera. They would then take turns to film his lessons.
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| The use of video allows
students to review and revise at their own pace. |
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The Solar System Comes Alive!
His first video recording was a Science lesson on “The Solar System”. To help students understand the concept- “The Earth takes one day (24 hours) to make one rotation about its axis and one year to make one revolution around the Sun”, Mr Low ‘dramatised’ this concept by getting a pupil to stand in front of the class as the “Sun”. As “Earth”, Mr Low would raise his cupped arms (to symbolise the axis) and “spin” slowly about the axis (in rotation). At the same time, he would move around the pupil in a “revolution”. This scene was captured on tape and generated much laughter and drew greater interest than a textbook explanation could. At the end of the day, the children remembered the concept clearly as they viewed the clip. They were even able to spell the words “revolution” and “rotation” with ease.
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| Using video, Mr Low helps
students improve on their communication skills. |
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Debating & Doing Sums
After gathering some positive feedback from students, Mr Low chose to take the project further by filming his class’ English debate sessions. Each speaker was captured on tape after which Mr Low edited the footage. During their debrief session, the video was shown to the whole class.
In this way, speakers got to see how they actually performed during the debate session. Mr Low would then provide comments on their pronunciation, postures and intonation, as well as their articulation skills. This helped them improve on their oral and communication skills.
Mr Low also used video to capture his Maths lessons. An example was in the area of model drawing where students were shown how to draw a model from scratch in relation to a particular problem sum. He found that, in this way, students didn’t just see a “completed model” in a textbook; they actually learned how to construct a model drawing after interpreting the mathematical sentences. This proved useful when they viewed the clip at home and helped to refresh their memory when they did their revisions.
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Students download the training
videos onto their thumb drives or CDs.
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Implementation & Improvement
Students have free access to his training videos as they have either a thumb drive or a CD-RW. Once a video had been converted into an MPG movie, they would be instructed to bring these storage devices to school. They can then go to the computer laboratory to download the video file - housed centrally in one of the school’s network folder - onto their thumb drives. Those who have CD-RWs can burn the files onto them as these can be reused continuously. students then transfer the video clips onto their home PC hard disk.
Over time, students will have a collection of video resources at their disposal. They can then easily complement their textbooks with the videos when they are revising for their examinations. Inevitably, IT skills are also imparted to the students: in fact, some students initially had no idea what a thumb drive was and a few had no idea how to “burn” a file onto a CD-RW.
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Pointing out the finer
points of presenting and speaking during the post-mortem.
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These videos are also available to his colleagues who are teaching in the same level, and Mr Low is also helping those who are keen to learn video filming and editing skills, and who plan to get their own lessons on tape.
At his Principal’s suggestion, Mr Low has also started to capture lessons conducted by experienced Senior Teachers. Their videos are used as training material for beginning teachers as well as contract teachers.
Spinoffs
With the success of this project, Mr Low has begun work on converting his lessons into audio form such as the popular mp3 format. This will benefit students who have mp3 players as they can listen to his lessons at their convenience.
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