I am having a great time looking through video clips at YouTube and Google Video. The easiness of embedding the video into your own classroom webpage or blog makes it particularly interesting for us elementary school teachers, since we can be assured that no “sex kitten” advertisement will pop up unexpectedly on the side. Just be careful, since students when on their own can click on the video and are taken to the YouTube site.
There are two areas of videos in the foreign language classroom that I want to concentrate this school year on:

1. Using videos made by others
2. Create my own videos

Ideas for using videos:

• Search for funny commercials in your target language
• Search for touristy videos in your target country
• Search for music videos in your target language

Ideas for making videos:

• Have students create a story in target language and act them out
• Create an game show
• Sightseeing Tour of areas of interest in the target culture

Feel free to contribute to ideas about context of videos or software/hardware tools to use in creating videos with or for your students.

The coolcatteacher has created a video (about online safety) with her students using a Logitech Camera where her students are “morphed” into Avatar characters. The facial expressions stay the same. This is how coolcatteacher explained it:

The one I showed here is slightly edited in Pinnacle Studio 10. However, the software with the web cams is what morphed the face. The web cams are $95 each — they are logitech QuickCams. I got them from CDW-g and they rest on the top of the desktop which allows the camera to be picked up and go mobile (especially if you have a laptop.) The Logitech software is worth the $95 because it does everything!
I think this approach would help out in the “protecting” the students’ identity arena (always an issue in our elementary school) and at the same time giving the shier students a voice and “face” who otherwise would not go in front of the camera.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-9105533225888902751" width="400" height="326" wmode="transparent" /]

Posted: 26. August, 2006 at 10:27 pm. Filed under: Uncategorized.
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