Using iPads to record videos

I have a class who love the creative element of Creative iMedia but the research part is less interesting for them.  I can sympathise & some of the topics aren’t the most interesting.

On Tuesday I was delivering a lesson about internet connections which from past experience has not been the easiest thing to deliver or one that has produced the best quality work.

I decided within the lesson to use iPads which have just been bought by the school to record the students speaking about dial up internet, broadband internet & Wi-Fi.  This turned out to be much more productive than previous lessons on the same topic! 

I had anticipated that the students would use the iPads to mess about with the numerous apps installed on them but they were brilliant! All of the students remained on task & completed the work that I asked of them.  I had structured the lesson so that the looked at source material, answered questions & then recorded their first video & so on.  I think this worked well & the videos produced were really good. I definitely think the scaffolding of the lesson was the key to it’s success.  By having a 5 part lesson (starter, dial up, broadband, wifi, plenary) pace was good & this helped engagement.

Ideally I would have liked all of the students to record their own videos & then use iMovie to edit them together but this hasn’t really been possible because of time restrictions.  However, it only took me a few minutes to drop the videos onto the timeline & export them.  If it wasn’t so close to the end of term I would have definitely got students to edit their videos themselves. 

I started with this video purely for the sound.  The sound of dial up internet is so familiar to anyone around my age or older but none of the students in my class could identify it or linked it to internet access.

I think most students were quite surprised at how internet access has progressed.

I also used these videos to scaffold the lesson: