The use of video as a learning tool was something I used a lot in my classes at Oxbridge. My first classes used it a lot, but later classes not so much. I also used video on occasion to record what was going on in my class. As a teacher you are interacting with many pupils over the course of a day, and recording this activity was useful to see what I was doing, and how I might improve my performance, but also to see what the children were doing. Pupils are able to see what they were doing and look at areas where they might become more focused.
My time may have been taken up with particular pupils, while others were less involved and this was a good way to achieve balance. It also allowed me to see what was going on in areas of the classroom that I wasn’t watching and to see how engaged pupils were in their work.
This particular video was the last I recorded before leaving Oxbridge and looking at it now is very interesting. Most of the day was recorded, and here we have eleven minutes of our busy day. I was particularly pleased to see the amount of pupils’ work on display on every wall surface. We were always busy, and although to some, it may seem like not much is happening in the clip, everyone is following a timetable of planned activities. There were some demanding pupils in this class of about 35 children, and it was good to see if any pupils were not receiving enough support. It sounds louder than it actually was in class, technology wasn’t as advanced in those days, audio picked up a lot of sounds.
There are three short clips where pupils are engaged in a variety of activities, and in the middle a lady comes in to get dinner numbers, (I think it might have been Jaime Capila’s mother working at the school). At the end of the day we get ready to leave.
I did show the pupils the video and billed it as ‘We’re going to watch a scary movie’, they were a bit disappointed though as they didn’t find it as scary as me! 🙂 A couple of former pupils from that class, who were at the reunion in 2018, reminded me about that ‘scary movie’. I was amazed that they even remembered after all these years.
