Video Creation: Teaching the Mechanics
Students will need to learn some basic technology skills for creating, uploading, and sharing videos. Below are quick video tutorials.
You may watch these videos to familiarize yourself with how your students can create and share videos in your class. These videos make no reference to a specific class and enable students to make and share videos for various kinds of assignments. You may include these videos within your own class, making them available to students. Rather than (repeatedly) spend time in class teaching these workflows, a professor can instead point students to short tutorial videos like these, which they can watch (as many times as they need) outside of classtime.
Basic Video Documentary: via PowerPoint
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Screencast-O-Matic (free version)
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Screencast-O-Matic & YouTube
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This lengthy video tutorial, by Justin Brown, covers iMovie, Mac's complimentary videomaking software.
At places like YouTube, and education-oriented websites you man find tutorials that other people have made (as with the above examples) that can demonstrate to students how to make videos. However, existing tutorials on the web (video or otherwise) may have more or less than your students need for your class, and may not be ideal. As with any assignment, you'll need to consider whether existing resources are appropriate, or something more specific must be made.
Cheap and Free Options for Video
Below are several applications, either desktop- or web-based, that enable you and your students to create videos incorporating static or dynamic content. Some, such as Screencast-O-Matic, just record whatever's on screen, together with a voiceover. These can be used in conjunction with presentation apps such as Prezi or Google Presentations. Others, such as iMovie, enable users to add images, record a narration, and edit all on a video playtrack. Microsoft Powerpoint, widely available for Windows users, simply records narrations and slide timings for a slideshow presentation, and exports the resulting presentation in .mp4 video format.
Your students may know of, or discover, and elect to use other software. That's fine, so long as they complete the objectives of your assignment. What is more, you can make clear to students that part of the assignment is learning how to make a video. With the wealth of tools and tutorials available, it is reasonable that they learn this on their own, rather than insisting you teach them the steps.
Quick Videos: Panopto Recorder
As noted below the default method to host student videos on the web is via Panopto, which is available to courses, faculty and students within D2L. Panopto allows students to upload video they create using other tools, but conveniently has it's own recorder that runs in a web browser. So students can create videos quickly within the D2L tools they are already familiar with, such as dropboxes or discussion posts.
You can share the Panopto Student Submission Guide with students, by installing the link in your D2L course.
Recording and Editing on a Computer
Students have free, effective toolsets whether they use a Windows or Mac PC or Laptop. These offer more capabilities for editing and building multi-clip videos. You can share these with them by dropping the following link in D2L:
https://wiki.canisius.edu/display/FacTS/Web-Based+Video+for+Students#WebBasedVideoforStudents-LaptoporDesktopRecording
It can be part of the assignment that they need to learn to use video recording and editing tools. You need not be responsible for teaching them this; there are countless locations on the internet, including Microsoft and Apple documentation, where they can learn how to use these tools. Also, YouTube is overflowing with tutorials.
Hosting Videos
Once a video is created, in order for it to be shared it needs to be hosted, or stored and made available somewhere on the internet. You may have your students upload videos to places like YouTube but this should only be in specific cases where it is understood, from the beginning of the course, that they are making video available on the public internet (that is, for anyone in the world.) This might be useful, for example, if you are specifically having teams of students create explainer videos for use in K-12 education.
However, in most cases you may wish to limit access to student video creations to your course. Within D2L, you can use Panopto to both host your videos, as well as create a space for students to upload videos for you to see (and assess). Students "hand in" videos to Panopto, but in processes quite similar to submitting other assigned work in D2L. If they are submitting the video only for you to see, they go through a 0D2L D2L dropbox. If students upload and add their videos via a Discussion Topic in D2L, then other students can see (and comment on) their videos.
COLI supplies specific tutorials both for you and your students for the Panopto Assignments process.
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Here's a great discussion of creating a documentary video assignment (aimed at K-12 students, but certainly adaptable to higher ed.) University of Houston's College of Education: Educational Uses of Digital Storytelling. Sample Assignment: Builds on a traditional term paper assignment, having students bring traditional scholarship into video creation. It was created for an undergraduate history course geared primarily toward freshmen and non-history majors. |