Last June I had posted a note (Teacher as filmmaker: An update from down under) about the iVideos created by students from the University of Technology, Sydney (under the guidance of Dr. Matthew Kearney). iVideos or “idea videos” are short films often 2 minutes (or less) in duration in which a student explores an important issue in K-12 education.

The idea of iVideos connects with a couple of strands of work that I have been involved in. These include, the TPACK framework, and the learning by design approach. We have written about this in a variety of articles but the specific one that Dr. Kearney points to is:

Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Siebenthal, S. (2007). Teacher as Filmmaker: iVideos, Technology Education, and Professional Development. In M. Girod & J. Steed (Eds.), Technology in the college classroom. Stillwater, Oklahoma: New Forums Press.

In this article we argue that there is great value in having teachers engage in such creative, design tasks since it allows them to “transform ideas and practice by immersing themselves in deep pedagogical consideration of subject-matter, significance, audience, learning, epistemology, and aesthetics.” Some evidence of this comes from a blog post by Dr. Kearney, based on his experience of having his students create their own iVideos. He says that,

We noted a high degree of emotional investment, motivation and interest in these tasks amongst our student teachers and postulate that these outcomes were a catalyst in their TPACK development. [You can read the entire blog post here.]

As in the previous year, Dr. Kearney’s students have been busy working on working on a new set of videos for 2011. In this years edition students created iVideos in three main areas related to the use of ICT in education. These topics include, Teacher professional learning; Curriculum; and Social, Ethical, Legal and Equity issues around ICT. There are over 2 dozen videos on the site and you can access them by going to

http://sites.google.com/site/teacherivideos/

Incidentally, you can see last year’s videos by following this link

http://sites.google.com/site/teacherivideos/2010-ivideos

Click the links above to see the these iVideos and, if possible, take a moment to write a comment or response to the videos. It will take you just a few minutes of your time but I know this will be greatly appreciated by the students.