Teacher as filmmaker: An update from down under

by | Monday, June 07, 2010

Back in 2007, I was second author on a paper titled Teacher as Filmmaker, in which we described an approach to teacher professional development that involved teachers creating short, evocative movies, which we called iVideos. You can read the paper and abstract (below).

Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Siebenthal, S. (2007). Teacher as Filmmaker: iVideos, Technology Education, and Professional Development. To appear in M. Girod & J. Steed (Eds.), Technology in the college classroom. Stillwater, Oklahoma: New Forums Press.

In our Masters program in Educational Technology at Michigan State University, K-12 teachers create “iVideos” – short, two-minute, digital videos designed to evoke powerful experiences about educative ideas. For example, an iVideo might enable viewers to experience the vastness of space, the interconnection between people and their environment, the timeless themes in great literature, and other compelling subject-matter ideas. How might these teacher-made iVideos serve as catalysts for teacher technology education and professional development? We describe the conceptual foundation of iVideos by building on the metaphor of teacher as filmmaker – an idea that highlights how teachers and filmmakers both strive to create powerful experiences for their audiences. In doing so, we argue that teachers are enabled to transform ideas and practice by immersing themselves in deep pedagogical consideration of subject-matter, significance, audience, learning, epistemology, and aesthetics. We also discuss how this approach develops teachers’ competency and efficacy with technology.

A week or so ago I received an email from Dr. Matthew Kearney, from University of Technology, Sydney informing us that, inspired by our work (as laid out in the above paper) students in their “pre-service teacher education elective class chose to make some ‘idea videos’ on a range of current issues in K-12 education.” You can see these movies by going to

http://sites.google.com/site/teacherivideos/

It feels great to know that our work was useful (and even inspiring) to others. Dr. Kearney adds that:

I would like to invite any interested student teachers at MSU to view an ‘ivideo’ of interest from our gallery and leave their reactions as a ‘comment’ at the bottom of the relevant page. (Our student teacher ‘filmmakers’ will be monitoring these pages for any feedback / comments / questions on conceptual or technical aspects of their iVideos.)

PS Please feel free to forward this invitation to any other teacher education institutions / staff who may be interested in this exercise.

Please take a moment to check out these videos. They are quite well done and worth a moment of your time. Drop a comment if you can, it will mean a lot to the students.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Community Design Lab at Madison

Community Design Lab at Madison

One of the greatest pleasures of my work here at ASU (with the Office of Scholarship & Innovation) has been the work we have been doing with local school districts. Essentially we collaborate with partner districts and community organizations to develop...

New Computational Thinking article published

Voogt, J., Fisser., P. Good, J., Mishra, P., & Yadav, A. (2015). Computational thinking in compulsory education: Towards an agenda for research and practice. Education & Information Technologies. Available at...

Mathematical insight on reality & you (yes, you!)

Mathematical insight on reality & you (yes, you!)

I have always been intrigued by the manner in which everyday ideas get "mathematicized" (if that's a word). For instance, the other day, on a bus-stop by my office I noticed an equation written on the wall. I have no idea why it was there, but...

How to author 85,000 (or is it 200,000) books…

Andrea Francis just emailed me a note about Professor Phillip Parker who is the world's fastest book author. He has over the past five years over 85,000 books to his name. He is also the most eclectic. As the article says, "He has authored some 188 books related to...

Open source conferencing

Just found out about Dimdim (bad name!) from Manas Chakrabarti's blog, At Any Rate. Dimdim is an opensource, free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download...

Complicating the idea of Design Thinking (in Education)

Complicating the idea of Design Thinking (in Education)

“Design thinking” is one of the latest buzzwords in education. Proponents argue that design thinking is a tried and tested process for fostering innovation in education while critics suggest that it is the latest fad to sweep through, and will, like others before it,...

Meta Poetry: I and II

Meta Poetry: I and II

This sentence refers to itself. This sentence declares that this blog post is about 2 poems I wrote recently. Both these poems are self-referential to some degree, namely both poems are about poetry. I have been interested in self-reference for along time—and this...

Finding Nemo, the sea-quel

Our family's stop-motion animation festival continues with our latest offering: Finding Nemo, the sea-quel!!  This movie was conceptualized by Shreya and filmed by all of us over a couple of days. What was interesting about this movie was just how many technologies...

Webs of activity in online teaching

Webs of activity in online teaching

Space filling web for the word "WEB"(created from the same shape repeated and rotated) I recently received a request (via ResearchGate) for something I had written back in 2004. In looking for it I realized that it had not been updated on my website. So below is...

5 Comments

  1. website flipping

    the video is really nice.

    Reply
  2. Santanu Mishra

    Sir,
    The ivideo (teacher as filmmaker) which is uploaded in your blog is tremendous & worth watching.This gives me moral boosting in my training to teachers herein BHUBANESWAR, ODISHA

    Thanks & Regards
    santanu

    Reply
    • Punya Mishra

      Thanks Santanu. It is amazing just how easy it is to create some of these videos, given the tools we have today. Many of these free or pretty cheap.

      Reply

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

  1. iVideos from Australia, the 2011 edition | Punya Mishra's Web - [...] Teaching, Technology, TPACK, Worth Reading | No Comments » Other related posts and pages: |Teacher as filmmaker: An update…
  2. TPACK revisited | Learning Conversations - [...] Mishra recently commented on our pre-service teachers’ ‘ideas videos’, and discussed the background to his coining of [...]
  3. Aerobic Exercise - How to Do Low & High Impact Aerobic Exercises : Specific Low Impact Aerobic Exercises - Instruction - [...] Teacher as filmmaker: An update from down under | Punya Mishra’s Web [...]

Leave a Reply to Santanu Mishra Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *