eSkills

3.4 Audio and video

Speaker: hello and welcome back to Module Three of this European Schoolnet Digital Skills course.
This is the Fourth part of Module Three where we are going to be having a look at some audio and
video tools and most importantly I used to think about how we might use them in the classrooms.
We talked a lot about audio and video, in recent times weve been talking a lot more about video,
but its also still important to remember that audio can be incredibly important as well not just in the
form of podcasts but writing for audio when you cant see the emotion on peoples faces, its really
quite a difficult thing to do.
From a personal point of view, Ive been using audio now for over 10 years but one of my favourite
example is still when I was head of Geography at Dumbarton Grammar School, every day young
people used to come to my room, they would go an measure the local weather, they would record a
short audio podcasts of about 60 seconds we would put them on the School Website and became
very popular with the local kitesurfers. Heres one of the examples that I kept.
Hello, Im [student 1] and welcome to Dunbar Grammar School Weather. The weather in Dunbar
today is slightly overcast with the wind coming from the South-South-East at six miles per hours,
although there has been some peak gusts of 20 miles per hour. The current temperature is eight
degree Celsius and getting more and more. The air pressure is decreasing which could mean a
change of weather. There is currently no rainfall
Well you get the idea, so it is very simple thing to do based around practical application of outline
learning learning and then giving the young people a chance to develop the digital skills and present
the final product to an authentic audience.
Its not just when we talk about video, its also not just people being in video as well, one of my
favourite application from back in the days at the Consolarium was an application called Crazy Talk.
There you can take the picture of people had drawn and animate them. A great way to combine art
and also writing. Crazy talks is a paid-for piece of software] but theres the simpler version which is
the online and web tool called Blabberize. This is an example from my friend and colleague Derek
Robertson who was working down in Dundee with primary school children on a project on the
Titanic. They drew some of the characters and they animated them using Crazy Talk, so they can tell
their own stories. A really powerful piece of work.
I am Sir. Alfred Reynolds I sailed on the wonderful ship Titanic, but she sank so she may not have
been so wonderful after all. I was in my bed when it happened I woke up when water rushed
through my cabin door. At that very second I got up and climbed through my cabin window.
You got the idea. Heres another one of my favourites.
Hi, Im a Dudu, the strange combination of a frog, dog, goat, monkey, tiger, bat and possibly a
unicorn.
As you can imagine things really are, you know, the opportunities are quite endless for creativity.
When we also talk about sound weve also got video and vodcasts. Im not going to play these for
you, but again from a number of years ago now these are some videos that my students creates and
published in YouTube on how to forecast the weather, very very popular and very well done. This is
quite a nice example as well, this is a literacy example where young people are using a chroma key,
the green screen to superimpose a false background behind them and also reading from an autocue

developing literacy skills around a thematic piece of work where theyre pretending to be rock stars.
Again, a really powerful and great thing.
we were not expecting this award and is such an honor to receive this. I would like to thank my
band members, Jesse, Toxic and Jef. And music man records and now thanks to the teachers that
believed in us. Well look at this now. Thats amazing to receive this award and were looking for
forward to putting it on to our mantel piece, for everyone to see it.
Again, hopefully you get the idea and thanks to Gavin Burn Primary School in particular Jillian Pelly
for letting me use those clips. So the whole idea of video is really powerful but also it comes back
this idea of authentic audience that we talked elsewhere about in this unit. This is Drummond
Community High School in Edinburgh, and they have an animation club. One of things they do in the
animation club is they put the clips online this allows to do several things: first provide the young
people the authentic audience, but secondly as well people can view their work and provide it with
stars, a mark out of five, summative assessment, but also leave moderated comments for them as
well and telling them how they can improve their work. It is important that we think about digital
tools that we also think about how you might use this tools to improve assessment processes as well
as improving the learning process.
YouTube is of course a really powerful tool, but it needs to be built up with trust and respect. I was
really lucky to work in a region like Scotland where YouTube was one of the tool which was
unblocked really early on. In fact, it was unblocked nearly seven years ago and I never forget going
to this class and seeing a group of girls practicing dance routine using YouTube Channel and I was
speaking to the teacher who just informed and already established a class rules at the start of the
year and she completely trusted children to use YouTube responsibly. In fact, of course, one of the
reasons why YouTube is still blocked in a number of places all over the World has nothing to do with
safe and security its actually to do with bandwidth. What else, Video Conference tool can also be
incredibly powerful. Here we have got a school in Dumfries in Gallaway thats actually been taught
musical instruments using video conference, again quite a sophisticated way of doing things. In this
instance here the teacher is able to work with a small rural primary school to be able to deliver the
music curriculum. The reason he is doing it this way is because the small school has only got one
teacher and that teacher is not a music specialist. Maybe not ideal but an interesting way of doing
things differently to help improve the education of children in small rural areas.
Of course its not got to be sophisticated video conference facilities, theyre also offering a number
of free tools available as well, such as Google Hangouts and Skype. If you have not heard about
Skype in the classrooms, thats education.skype.com, thats certainly worth registering, it means you
can connect to literally hundreds of thousands of teachers around the world, that are interested in
using video-conferences and connecting to different classrooms. Here is a picture from my old
school where actually we were showing the whole of the first year group of people, they where
skyping in an explorer at the North Pole and the young people were able to ask him questions and
he was being able to answer. Theres something really powerful about video conference rather than
YouTube clip or DVD because it is all happening in real time. It really does capture the imagination of
children.
Another activity that you can do with Skype in the classroom is that you can basically do a mystery.
In this activity what happens is children in two schools from around the world have to try work out
and pin point to the nearest mile or meter where their school is. In this example here one of my
Geography Teacher has twinned with a middle school in Edmonton, Canada, and both of the young
people are discussing the weather and also where the different schools are. What a great rich

experience thats got really great citizenship values in there as well. Again, all of this possible just for
the bit of collaboration and linking tools together. Im often asked how can we edit videos? Theres a
number of tools to do this, first of all depending on your type of computer, it might have built-in
editing software. If youre looking for something online then I really like Wevideo, you can login with
a variety of accounts such as your Google account or also your Office 365 account and it will
automatically sync to your domain. One thing that people dont realize is you can also edit directly
in YouTube. This is a great way to be able to edit video, particularly if you plan to showcase your
work via YouTube platform which I would certainly recommend because it has got a great tool to
improve your audience. The last tool which I want to flag up in this section before I give you two
Hidden Gems is something called Office Mix. Office Mix is a free plugin for PowerPoint and what it
allows you to do is allows you to record your PowerPoint presentations, it allows you to capture
yourself as a presenter a little bit like what Im doing now and also add hand-drawn annotations and
also quizzes to your PowerPoint presentation. The great thing about this is that you can use what we
sometimes call the Flipped Classrooms. What the flipped classrooms is that rather than giving a
traditional lecture in a class you pre-record your lecture and young people watch it as a home
learning activity. This means when you get into the classrooms the teacher can then start to check
the understanding of the content depending on if the young people if they watched the video or
not. Its a powerful learning model once children and members of staff have the habits required for
rolling it out. It really has got the potential for massive amount of impact across Europe.
So, thats the end of that particular unit, Im looking forward to see you in the next unit. I hope you
enjoyed some of the tools and suggestions that Ive got there. Moving forward is important that you
think about your own personal context like youre an earlier educator, a primary educator, a
secondary educator and your specialist subject area and think about how could you use sound,
audio and video in your curriculum by using some of the ideas and adapting some of the ideas that I
showed you here. See you next time.