Videos in the Classroom

Videos in the classroom.....an increasingly prevalent topic as our schools become more technologically equipped and technology literacy becomes more and more important for our young people. My junior and high school experiences with videos is that of a teaching substitute rather than a teaching aid or tool. In this light, I found myself really connecting with the Karppinen article, in that videos can and should be meaningful tools in the classroom and that "simply presenting information in a stimulating and interesting digital format [aka--watching a movie in class] will not automatically lead to indepth learning" (p. 253). Out of the six learning characteristics Karppinen presents, I am most interested in the active, collaborative & conversational, and guided elements, as I think that these are often forgotten when a video is presented to the classroom.

I love the idea of bringing videos into the classroom, but I want to make sure that they are used in a meaningful way to further students' understanding of an issue or idea. A few clips that I am interested in bringing into my English classroom (when I teach Hamlet to a high school class) are scenes from different versions/direction of Hamlet--in particular, the Kevin Branagh and Mel Gibson versions. These stick out to me as prime vehicles for furthering students' thinking of interpretation when it comes to reading Shakespeare and how different representations of the text lead to very different interpretations of the meaning of the text. For example, the scene in which Hamlet confronts Gertrude and "sees" his father's ghost is hugely different in the two versions, namely in the oedipal representations. Showing just a few minutes of this scene from each version will allow for engaging discussion with the class. I think that talking about the video, approaching it critically as a text and not just a movie, is the key to including video in a meaningful way.