At #TMCotham last night I delivered a very well received 5-minute presentation, all about the best investment I ever made into the teaching and learning in my department. So what was it that I spent that fateful £30 on that really changed things for us?

What Was I Looking For?

It was about a year ago and I was looking to stock up on a few more digital cameras, because whilst it is fine and groovy to have students use their own devices to record video on; it does also flag up a few embarrassing situations when you’re trying to get that video off their device and the student’s entire photo collection is visible for a few seconds. To get around that I’ve always kept a cache of relatively inexpensive (£100) point-and-shoot cameras around, but these had been breaking and it was time to get more.

The problem is that these are actually quite a large investment of capitation if you want any more than one or two, to get five it would be the best part of £500 and the quality wouldn’t be what the students are expecting.

I’d also been waiting patiently for Google Glass to find its way to the UK. I’ve got vision with this one, imagine a future where teachers are specced out with Google Glass and student face recognition technology: imagine seeing a student in the corridor and Google Glass silently displaying an overlay of the student’s data in your eye line as you talk – the implications would be amazing!

Anyway, whilst searching Amazon for cameras I suddenly had a bright idea and searched for ‘video recording glasses’.

Amazon link to buy the glasses

I immediately bought one, getting a 16gb TF card to use with it for £35 all in. This rocked. Firstly, it’s a fifth of the price of a generic, half-decent point-and-shoot digital camera, secondly it will allow for POV recording. So they took a bit of time to come but they worked wonders when they arrived. If so then I could get five of these for the price of a single point-and-shoot!

Why Care?

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As you can see from this sample recording GIF it works really well for getting a student to record and explain a sample of their work. This example is from a group project where I’ve asked the group leaders to go and interview the members of the group to explain what they’ve achieved, how they met the marking criteria and discussing improvements that they should be making.

That’s amazing because now when I’m marking a group project I really can just sit down with the group leader and review their footage, this gives us more opportunity to review the learning, be honest and reflective and set more exciting targets than we would otherwise. It also serves as an implicit record of the achievement of students in your lesson and we’re certainly going to be showing that to Ofsted!

It also works really nice to watch bits of this footage as a class at the end, seeing clips of a group over the six lesson project go from strength to strength is highly motivational and the students really love having an X-factor style ‘best bits’ montage at the end of a project.

No Screen = No Vanity

Have you ever sent a group of students off with a normal digital camera to record something? They’re gone for an hour and come back with five minutes of poor footage, mainly because they’re busy watching, reviewing and deleting any video that’s not Hollywood standard. They never are Hollywood standard.

That doesn’t matter to us, but to the students it’s horrific and they’ll spend hours reshooting a five minute video because someone laughed, or someone’s hair looks awful or maybe just because they aren’t happy with the way they sound.

This is a distraction to the point of the video recording task, when you use a pair of video recording glasses then students don’t get to see the footage before you do, they can’t delete anything and so what you get is a full stream of consciousness recording. Much better for most purposes.

They also work better to melt away into the background, no one’s standing around unnaturally holding a camera for all to see and act up to, someone’s just wearing slightly naff glasses and students soon forget that they’re being recorded. It’s a completely different experience and because of that I thought it might be useful elsewhere.

Lesson Observations

8odne So we bought another one. With two at my disposal I snuck them into lesson observations, and they worked a treat. Ever tried to record a lesson observation? The students act even stranger than if there’s just a member of senior leadership in the room! Not so with our video recording glasses, and better than that you get a pupil’s eye view of the lesson so you can really see what they get up to whilst you’re running around being inspiring.

One of the things that works for us is using Final Cut Pro X on the Macs to edit these two videos into one so that you can give different pairs of the glasses to different ability students. It’s very difficult to argue against the need for differentiation by task when you see for yourself the different abilities and actions of two very different learners.

Where it works well is for observations of long lesson in departments, the batteries last about an hour and a half, good enough for most lessons. We take the footage, edit it like in the gif above and simply all sit down together and watch it back: fast forwarding, pausing and rewinding as we see fit. The important thing is the conversation, it turns a lesson observation into a real-time coaching event and you can have some fantastically productive conversations to improve teaching and learning without struggling to remember what was going on.

Summary

Video recording glasses are brilliant, because:

It’s a cheaper way of getting video recording into your classroom
The only way to watch the video is with a USB cable into your computer, so no one can delete or review the footage until you say so
It allows students to naturally record work and progress
They are much more subtle than traditional cameras and so allow observations and pupil work recording with more natural behaviour
Footage is high definition with great audio so we can watch it back in our teams and have useful coaching style conversations about the teaching and learning happening
It implicitly records pupil progress

I’d really recommend giving it a go!

I’ve recently been the grateful recipient of a Jooby Gorillapod. No, it’s better than the name suggests – it’s a really, really useful tripod for the iPhone. But, more than this, the unique way it’s designed means that you can pretty much attach or mount the iPhone anywhere!

So what have I been using it for? Aside from my ongoing quest to create Charlie-Brooker-esque theory videos for ICT and Computing (still a quest unfortunately, can’t get the sound right!); I’ve found this a real turning point in my use of video in the classroom.

It sounds silly, but having the ability to stick my iPhone anywhere and leave it recording is having myriad benefits to my own pedagogy as well as Student achievement. This has happened, quite naturally, from my adoption of setting up the Gorillpod and letting it record – just getting used to having it running in the classroom without putting on a show for it.

Step two was forcing myself to actually go back and review those recordings. Yes, in some respect watching a lesson back that you have just taught is a little like living in Groundhog day – but you get to see yourself as a teacher practising your craft – just as the students would see you. From there you’ll already be acutely aware of the flaws and limitations in your delivery; are you going too fast? Do you have any annoying habits? Are you missing behaviour events right in front of your nose?

Step 3 was in brining it into the student realm and using it to record their responses to questioning, peer reviews and discussions. After the initial novelty wears off there’s a strong motivating factor in having a recording of their responses for future reference. Students seem to take the exercises more seriously and having the footage to refers back to is golden.

Referring back can take a number of forms: You could use it as reference material, you could splice together peer reviews from different parts of a project to allow students to better visualise their progress; and you could use it as a whole class activity to dissect and critique learning styles.

Pushing metacognition (understanding your own thinking) as an important skill, Students can take what they have previously said and work on strategies for improvement. Peers will be much nicer in reviewing students responses than a student will be to themselves!

The fantastic thing about all of this is that after building up a bank of recordings, we can measure the improvement of students and genuinely see if their metalearning skills are improving their performance.

Why use video?

Student engagement, achievement and understanding of their own learning process increases as long as you use the video in lesson and don’t just archive it never to be seen again. Students even watch each others videos cross curricularly, building up a mass of skills that they can improve upon.

Teachers get to see themselves teach. Yes, it might be cringe worthy, but try and push past this and critique yourself – your practice can only benefit from it.

Top Tips

The biggest tip I’ve got for you: don’t make it an enormous effort. If you have to go too far out of your way to make it regular classroom practice then after the initial fun has worn off you’ll stop using it. The key is to pop a camera somewhere, record the lesson, not be too precious about the quality of the footage and then actually go to the trouble of using the video later

Case study

GCSE Computing (Year 10)

The group were due to study the differences between open source and proprietary software, as well as bespoke and off-the-shelf software. Rather than leading a didactic lesson I simply covered the basics and set them a debating challenge.

I got them all excited and enthusiastic with some examples of good and bad debates (from the archives of iOS vs Android and XBox vs PlayStation) and set them in teams to prepare to argue why their topic was best.

I recorded the debates using the iPhone attached to one of the mounted speakers in the corner of the room. The debates were great, passioned, reasoned arguments with some innovative and interesting arguments.

The real positive came in the next lesson where we reviewed the recordings, critiqued the performance, questioned the factual accuracy of the statements made and then, finally, made a series of Cornell notes on the topic covered.

Students not only researched for themselves on this unit, but had an impetus to be experts in their subject (to win the debate) and built on their metacognitive skills in analysing the debate word-for word.

Conclusion

Give it a go! You don’t need any fancy equipment, just something that records video and the impetus to use that recording in the classroom. I’m sure many of you already use video in a similar way; I just found the key to me using it regularly and successfully was in not making it a chore!

The Best Thirty Quid I’ve Ever Spent (for Teaching and Learning) #TMCotham