Using Videos to Enhance Your Science Instruction
Last week, we were studying reptiles where I have the reptile notes on a powerpoint and can project them for the students to read and copy. At the end of the powerpoint I included a link to national geographic videos. There, we found short clips of crocodiles and how females care for their young. Later, I was able to pull up videos from youtube showing a snake swallowing an egg much bigger than its head.  Students love these videos and often beg me to show them more, the “python swallows baby” under the related videos section seemed of particular interest to my freshman boys (I wonder why).
These quick clips (assuming you carefully preview them first) can be very valuable additions to a science lecture. Often the 1-2 minutes are about what you need to emphasize a point, like to show that snakes can unhinge their jaws.  Back when I was in school, I often looked forward to those science filmstrips that showed me what life was like for a lion on the Savannah.  Nowadays, these hour long movies just don’t seem to appeal to the average teenager’s attention span. Though I still love to watch lions and zebras and any other animal that happens to be on “Animal Planet”, I’ve stopped trying to get my students to watch and appreciate these hour-long documentaries. Nowadays, I’m much more likely to show a clip or a short 15 minute section of a DVD. I do love the “Eyewitness” videos- these are about 25 minutes long and focus on a particular group of animals, like mammals, or a scientific topic, like tornadoes.
With freshman and even older students, I do run into trouble getting them to pay attention to these longer videos. For some reason, when I switch on the TV, this signals their brains to go into a vegetative state, it’s the craziest thing.  I’ll look up five minutes into my favorite video on lions to see 10 heads laying down on their desk, a few of them writing notes or doing homework for another class, and maybe two students actually paying attention to the video. Sometimes, I would stop the video to yell and berate them and explain how lucky they are to watch a video about these animals, a few threats and I’d get some of them to begrudgingly perk up.   Fortunately, for my own sanity, I’ve found a better way to get and hold their attention to these videos – the video worksheet.  Basically, you preview the video and come up with questions for the students to answer as the video plays. These questions don’t need to be difficult, but they probably should be questions the students can only answer by watching the video.
Now, some of you are probably wondering why I even bother to show them a video if students don’t even care enough to watch it. Or maybe you think I’m just trying to give them busy work or fill time in class.  That’s really not the case. I grew up on a steady diet of PBS and strongly believe that my love for science, animals, and nature in general comes from these programs.  Students are blitzed with too much media now to really be pay attention to documentaries unless they are strongly encouraged to watch them. Add to that, my lectures (exciting as they may be) about dolphins, pythons, and snakes just really aren’t going to illustrate these animals as well as a clear picture of the animal living its day-to-day life or doing what it does best, like swallowing an egg.  I feel its my job to make sure they see these things, because they are not likely to seek it out on their own or pause in their channel changing long enough on the discovery channel to learn anything meaningful.
A complete list of video worksheets I have made can be found at the Video Worksheet page.
February 14, 2010
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smuskopf · 
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