This marks the end of my fourth week teaching a digital video class at the Yaakoosgé Daakahídi Alternative High School here in Juneau. The school is a part of The Association of Alaska School Boards’ Consortium for Digital Learning initiative, an amazing effort to get laptops into the hands of every student in Alaska.

I’m not sure what the ultimate fate of this initiative will be but it sure makes it easier to teach a video class. I was over at Yaakoosgé a few years back as part of the artists in the schools program, both the students and the school have come a long way since. I’m not sure what part the laptops play in this evolution but the students are demonstrating a great deal of responsibility and proficiency with the two thousand dollar machines they’ve been handed by the school.

I’ve been utilizing YouTube heavily to teach the class and assignments aren’t complete until they’ve been uploaded and posted to our class group.

The first assignment on the first day was to create and introduction video journal and post it to a YouTube account. Some students already had their own accounts and others didn’t even have email but most everyone seems to have caught on quickly.

The second week, after everyone saw the process of creating a video and posting it to our group, we took a step back and focused on editing techniques and cinematography. I’ll be filling in more holes as we go so the videos should be steadily improving.

Our first big project started last week with the students working to create public service announcements. Many chose to make recycling PSAs so that they could participate in the JUMP Society Recycling PSA Competition.

The class will continue to produce video journals as we go and the culminating project starting next week will be a short documentary film.

YouTube has been a great platform for teaching since I can post short lessons for the students or share links to videos I want them to see. All the movie clips and pirated content has been a great resource too. I’m no lawyer but I believe that it’s a fair educational use of that material but I suppose it doesn’t absolve YouTube of any wrongdoing in the eyes of the content owners. Maybe they could start an educational branch of their site for qualified students and teachers to share relevant clips. It sure would save teachers time hunting down videos in the library or trying to rip clips from arcane formats.

• Yaakoosgé Spring 2007 Group

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 3rd, 2007 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Projects & Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.