A Guide for Teaching Students to Use Video Appropriately [VIDEO DOWNLOAD]
As a teacher, you probably expect students to maintain certain standards when they’re writing papers for you or creating oral presentations. But because creating a video is a “fun” project, students may not realize that many of the same rules still apply. So we put together a video offering some guidelines for creating a video or slideshow project that’s not just fun to create, but original and appropriate for your class.
You can download the video below, or create your own version with tips that match your subject and students’ ability levels. Afterwards, check out our guide to creating rubrics for video projects, which includes a downloadable rubric you can use and adapt when assigning students projects that involve making a video.
Exploring guidelines with students
In addition to sharing the video above, you might want to go into more detail on some of the points in the video. Here are a few ideas for fostering discussion:
- Plagiarism. Students often don’t realize that it’s possible to plagiarize a video. Discuss how taking visuals or text from another video is still a kind of plagiarism.
- Citing sources. Though they may be familiar with “copying” in a written paper, once again, students may not know they should cite the sources they’ve used to create a video. Either suggest they submit a written bibliography along with their presentation, or have them include references at the end of their video.
- Appropriate language. The video medium may encourage students to be less formal than they might be in a written paper — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing! But it doesn’t hurt to remind them that while this is a video, it’s still a video for school, so language and content should reflect that. This particular aspect of creating videos also opens the door to discussions about sharing information publicly — either in school or outside of it — and why students should carefully consider what they share and how they share it.
- Copyright. Most images, video clips, and songs come with some copyright attached. Show students how to make videos that they can share without worrying about copyright infringement by giving them sources for public domain images and video clips — like the ones in this blog post. You can also let them know that the music they use in Animoto is specially licensed, so they can choose any song from our collection and use it legally.
- Grammar. Nothing makes a video look less professional than misspelled words or other glaring grammar errors.
Are there any tips we missed? Reach out on Facebook or Twitter and let us know!