Setup is key

Camera (and microphone) placement is crucial. We have learned through many unsatisfactory experiences that you can't just point and shoot and get useful results. The setup is key. Attention must be paid!

No single physical setup will suffice for all situations. The setup must be tailored to the physical nature of the space and the type of situation that you want to document. For instance, to document a teacher working around a table with a small group of students in a peer-editing situation, you would need to set up for a close shot, place an external mike on the table, and know how the teacher plans to carry out the session (so you can capture the relevant sequences).

Plan ahead

Without a plan, you lose. Before you begin shooting, both the subject and the camera operator need to have in mind what they want the completed video to look like: Do they want to capture the look in the students' faces? Do we need to see the text on the pages in front of them? The teacher's gestures? How long will the completed clip be?

I can't hear you

Audio is more important than video. More educational videos fail because you can't hear what's happening, than any other cause. For example, if it's a teacher's lesson that you are filming, you must mike the teacher. (To mike someone is to place a microphone on or very near them to pick up the sound of their voice.) Student speech will be inaudible unless you mike them, use a directional mike on the camera, or shoot from less than three feet away.

Steps to follow

My advice to students or teachers planning to create video would be:

1. Think through what you want to capture in this session. What are they key ideas or activities that you want to show? When will they happen in the session? What images, and what sounds, are essential to communicating these key ideas? Make sure your actors and camera operator know the answers to these questions.
2. Make a storyboard of what you'd like the final video to look like. ("First a wide shot of the students entering the room, 5 seconds. Then a close up of the teacher greeting one or two students and answering their private questions (close audio), 10 seconds. Then cut to a wide shot of the teacher introducing the lesson to the whole group (close audio), 15 seconds. Next a clip (with voice-over to be added later) showing students forming into small groups (10 seconds). Then two small groups of students at work, close video, close audio, capturing visual expression and voice, 20 seconds each. Close with a wide shot of final discussion with the entire class, with B-roll of close-ups of five students and three different teacher shots, 20 seconds.")
3. Plan the setup with 1 and 2 in mind. This will in most cases call for the cameraperson to carry an outline of the script, to move around the room to get the best angle, and to re-place the microphones as necessary.
4. Learn about light. Shoot so that your subjects are lit from the front. Never, never shoot into the classroom windows. Shoot with the light behind you.
5. Close in. Most student and teacher videos are shot much too wide to be useful or interesting. Pretend you are following a reporter on 60 Minutes, trying to capture the beads of sweat on the subject's forehead.

Most of the world's work is accomplished through collaboration. Seldom does an individual acting completely alone build the vehicle, solve the business problem, or farm the field. Most of the work that people do is carried out in small groups where several folks contribute to the final result. But much of the work of our students in school is solitary: the math worksheet, the spelling test, the research report, the questions at the end of the chapter. To prepare our students for the real world, we should be assigning more work that requires collaboration. But this is not easy. Collaboration takes time and energy that is often unavailable in the classroom.

At the same time, we hear that the new communication technologies offered by computers and networks can facilitate and encourage collaboration, and that our students when outside of school take full advantage of these tools to communicate among themselves to accomplish their personal cooperative activities. (See Today's Students, in this series.) And we hear of modern corporations that succeed through virtual cooperation, where groups of employees spread out all over the world work together to design a new product or solve a difficult problem. This week's article provides some practical advice on how to design collaborative assignments that rely on new technologies to accomplish their goals.

Teaching collaboration

While today's students may have figured out on their own how to use all of the new communication technologies to plan their own social events and share their gossip, they seldom know how to use them for serious collaboration on projects designed to produce a solid result. So we must teach them the skills of collaboration, and provide them many structured and guided opportunities to practice this art in school. Just about every subject area offers the possibility of collaboration, but we must plan for it carefully in advance with more detail than the traditional individual assignment.

In the beginning, the teacher will need to spell out the process of collaboration, and monitor students' progress along the way. As students develop their skill at serious collaboration, they may no longer need this step-by-step guidance, but at first it is indispensable. For example, a middle-school social studies teacher might design a collaborative research project for groups of four students to work on together. She begins by posting this table on the class web site (or on the chalkboard, or on a paper handout, depending on her progress toward the paperless classroom.)

This table serves to clarify the beginning and end of the process, and to identify the steps along the way. It shows that students will do some of their collaboration in the classroom, under the eyes of the teacher, but that most of it will be accomplished on their own, outside of class hours, and outside of the classroom itself. This is an important element of good collaboration, and better represents the kind of work that students will do in college and in the workplace.

The teacher begins this assignment by explaining her expectations for the presentation that is due on December 15, its purpose, its length, the kinds of information and media that need to be included. She then outlines her expectations for how the group should work together to get it done, and the kinds of collaborative tools she expects them to use. She then details each of the way-points in the table, and the product that is due on each date listed.

During this two-week period, the class will meet ten times, but only three class meetings will be devoted to this assignment. The bulk of the work is to be done as collaborative homework. As they do this work on their own, the students will employ technologies that are familiar to them, but not necessarily for doing schoolwork. Here's how each tool is used.

Email

At the first group meeting in class on December 1, the students share their email and instant messaging (IM) addresses. They divide the research tasks among themselves, and agree to share what they have found by the next evening, using email. They agree to collect their research results in Word documents, and to exchange them through email. In this way, the group will know who has done their work and who hasn't, and will have time to prod the recalcitrant members -- through email, telephone, and IM -- so that they have something to show when the research is due on December 3.

Instant Messaging

Two of the group members who have agreed to organize the results get together on a pre-arranged IM session on the evening of December 3. Before the IM session, they have each separately reviewed the research results submitted by the other members of the group. Their IM conversation focuses on how best to categorize and sequence the results in preparation for building the presentation. They agree to call the rest of the group together the next night for a simultaneous chat where they can present their recommendations.

Chat

A chat is simply an IM session with more than two correspondents. A chat uses the same software (such as AOL Instant Messenger, iChat, or MSN Instant Messenger) as one-to-one IM. (See Educational Messaging, in this series.) All four of the group members discuss the proposed organizational scheme, modify it a bit, and cajole one of the members to compile a combined result for submission to the teacher the next day. (A school that licenses the Blackboard software might also conduct these group conversations using its synchronous Chat or asynchronous Discussion features.)

By the time they meet in class on December 6 to outline their presentation, the group is well-along in developing its project, and so the class time is spent productively planning the next steps in their assignment. At this face-to-face meeting, they agree on a 12-slide presentation, they specify the contents of each slide, and assign among themselves the gathering of the necessary text and media elements.

As they gather the elements over the next two days, they share their accomplishments and frustrations over email and IM, providing helpful suggestions to those who are stuck. And they ensure that the other members are actually working. Another scheduled chat on December 8 divides up the work into three slides each, and an agreement to send the slides to one of the members who will compile them into a single draft presentation. The draft passes muster with the teacher when it is handed in on December 14.

Serial Markup

To prepare the final product, the students pass the draft from one to the next in a process called serial markup. The first student attaches the PowerPoint file to an email to the second, who makes a few adjustments before sending it to the third, and so forth. When they arrive at class on the 15th, the presentation represents their best work, well-reviewed and the product of true collaboration.

 The next time this teacher assigns a collaborative project, she may be able to cut back on the steps and checkpoints, and let the students take more responsibility to get the work done themselves. By encouraging the use of the new technologies in pursuit of solid academic goals, this teacher is preparing her students for the future.

On one single day last week, two national reports led the news cycle: the secretary of defense and architect of U.S. strategy for the war in Iraq resigned; and singer Britney Spears announced that she would divorce her husband. The news arrived at the school I was working at in many ways: over the CNN monitor in the video lab; through text messages to students' mobile phones from their friends; over web pages displayed in the school library; and from news feeds relayed to faculty email addresses. The next day in the faculty room an interesting discussion occurred. "In your classroom, which news item generated the most discussion? Which one did we spend more time on in the faculty room?"

Before computers and networks and the Internet extended themselves into the lives of our students, neither of these topics would have been discussed in school until the next day, if at all. But so much more information flows into our schools and into the minds of our students these days. It used to be that perhaps 90% of the published information that a student confronted in school -- in the textbooks, in the library, in the classroom --was mediated by a responsible adult educator. That is, it was reviewed by a publisher or a teacher or a librarian and deemed appropriate for use in school. And 10% was unmediated information, about which we developed perhaps one short lesson per year on how to evaluate the reliability of such data.