This week, we had a guest come into our class to speak on the use of videos in the classroom. He touched on the topics of virtual field trips, animated GIFs, TeacherTube, Youtube and Khan academy. He also taught us about the pros and cons of using videos in the classroom.

In the exercise he gave us during class, we had to make our own Screencast tutorial, edit our screencast and then make our screencast interactive using the H5P plugin on your OpenEd.ca WordPress blog. I chose to make a tutorial on how to play fire boy and water girl. I really loved the idea behind this excerise and I thought it taught the important skill of creating resources for your students and learning how to teach through them.

I struggled to record the voice-over for my game since it was a two-person game so I had to also focus while playing the game which meant that it was hard for me to also vocalize my actions and instructions. I recorded it in the classroom so there was a lot of background noise in my video which I apologize for and there were times when I stumbled over my words too.

All in all, I believe that this was a great exercise since it showed us extremely valuable websites and gave us strategies to use when embedding technology in our future classrooms. As an educator, I will usually not have the knowledge for the backgrounds of lessons and it is important that I find reliable and accurate videos to help students learn the topic in a fun way. Videos like the ones we made are great for classroom use because students can visualize what is being asked while also listening to the instructions.