Having missed this session I hope to engage with this topic through reading about people’s experiences with videos through their blogs. As a start of this journey I chose to have a go at the pre-seminar task of exploiting the an online video.

Although I have been using short clips in class for over a year I don’t think I have ever made the most of them. After watching Jamie Keddie – Taking the Video apart I found a whole new appreciation for this media and Jamie as an excellent teacher. Despite using some of Jamie’s clips in the past I, stupidly, never thought of looking at his teacher’s notes! His talk about various ways of exploiting videos was  an eye-opener. I only ever thought to use clips as a warmer or a conversation prompt and rarely spent more than 15 minutes on those.  In his talk Keddie reminds us about video’s multi-modal nature which is pictured below. This simply lends itself to multi-level exploitation taking advantage of three different media complementing each other, yet sending open-ended messages separately.

In order to fully exploit the video we should take it apart layer by layer as if preparing learners for the activity. Keddie looks into isolating each aspect and eliciting the potential versions of a story from the students by a range of consciously selected questions. By using videos as input I found ‘ticking’ several of my principles throughout. Videos are realistic and authentic and allow the teacher to bring any context into the classroom they wish the learners to explore. This is incredibly important for classes of little diversity or ones which are ‘stuck’ with one teacher for the duration of the course. Moving image allows the learners to engage with different accents or Englishes as well as stimulate all their senses. Language focus could be hidden in questions the teacher uses as seen here:

Isolating the Visual

Keddie uses this brilliant advert to get his students speculating away as he exploits each layer of the video.  I found this extremely impressive as I have always found it difficult to come up with stimulating and challenging tasks for material found online.Though Keddie predominantly focuses on speculation in this particular video he changed the language focus by adapting instructions or shifting learners attention to a different layer of the film. I particularly enjoyed the use of acronyms for collocations in the listening comprehension exercise. I have since tried this as part of my song lesson you can see below. I was truly impressed how my students managed to negotiate meaning or the acronyms in pairs and speculated about parts of speech and word order in pairs.

Jake Bugg – Two Fingers

Here’s a short plan of my interpretation of Keddie’s videotelling technique using a video I came across in Goldstein & Driver (2015). This is still to be tested and I would welcome any feedback and ideas as it’s still far from a finished product. Here’s the link to the video:

A thousand words

And the Lesson Plan ( Draft…)

A thousand words Lesson Plan