Digital Video

     07.10.2014. You will ask: what is this date? Here is the answer. On this day Anna Harutunyan, Emily Hovhannisyan and I made a video. Can you imagine a self-made video? It was awesome. It’s not like I haven’t done anything like this before, but this experience was a bit different. Probably the reason was that this time I was making this video with my friends and secondly, because it was dedicated to the AUA.

     We called our video “One Day in the Life of the AUA”. In our video we tried to cover the places we spend most of our time at the AUA. These places include library, where we look for interested us literature and study, cafeteria, where have lunch and study, our classroom, where we do spend our classes. Our video was not only intended to show how we spend our day at the AUA, but also that the students come here for getting knowledge, for self-enriching themselves, i.e. for sake of study , which is the very suitable word for the AUA.

     How did we work on producing the video? Our video was made of several shots. When we were done with the shooting, we got down to montaging it. For this purpose we used a website “Kizoa”- a free slideshow maker and photo editing site. We did not use any special effects. We wanted to make it as natural as it is possible. It seems it turned out really well.

    As far as our hands-on project is dedicated to Video Production, we will be able to present website “Kizoa” and as an example we will show our video. I hope everyone will like our video.

    This was our first experience of making the video together, and as a result of our mutual collaboration we got an incredibly amazing “One Day in the Life of the AUA” which we’ll cherish as many other days that passed and days that are still to come in our memory forever.

P. S.   

  Basically, for my thesis project I was supposed to do movies as a source of the authentic language for foreign language learning and language enhancement and I had a lot of ideas how I was going to bring this project to realization. During my lessons I would introduce students with movies which could be a supplement for their curriculum and which also would present them with English-speaking culture and help not only to improve their language skills, particularly their listening and speaking skills, but also develop their critical thinking and broaden their outlook. In this case my students will act as the consumers. To turn them into producers I would also ask them to make a digital video, which would give them the opportunity to put their experience, imagination, creativity, innovative ideas into realization ; promote their collaboration and cooperation with their peers. Producing the digital video would give them the authentic learning opportunities, develop life skills and what’s important their video would be produced for in real-life contexts and real audience. My purpose is that after watching particular video on a certain topic students will be able to create a digital video related to that topic which will help them better to grasp the essence of the studied material. I think that could be a really good experience for them as students which at the same time will bring them one step closer to the e-learning. Unfortunately, I was demotivated and cut from the opportunity of realizing my ideas.

     As you see the usage of digital video has a lot of advantages and can be used for educational purposes. Of course, in my case I was going to combine watching movies and producing video/ movies, but this type of e-learning can be used in different pedagogical implications and different spheres. For example, if students study environment issues and topic of the day is “Pollution”, one of the tasks may be to make a video on “Pollution in Armenia”. That way students will be more engaged in learning process and will be the main investigators and witnesses of real-life situations happening in a particular context, in our case pollution in Armenia.

    That’s why my message to all of the teachers: do not be afraid of using technology in your class. Definitely some of you may think that using high tech tools will only divert your students’  attention from the studied material, but it is not so. On the contrary, it will motivate and encourage them more not only in theory, but what’s important in practice, because only in practical way our students will be able to get to the core of the studied material, which will be possible via using tech tools, particularly in this case, via digital video.