What kind of interaction would the video require from your students? Does it force them to respond in some way (inherent)? In what way are they likely to respond to the video on their own, e.g., make notes, do an activity, or think about the topic (learner-generated)? What activity could you suggest that they do after they have watched the video (designed)? What type of knowledge or skill would that activity help develop? What medium or technology would students use to do the activity? How would students get feedback on the activity that you set? What medium or technology would they and/or you use for getting and giving feedback on their activity? How much work for you would that activity cause? Would the work be both manageable and worthwhile? Could the activity be scaled for larger numbers of students?
In this blog post, I’ll be analyzing the video “Supporting Emotional Wellbeing in Children: Calming Your Mind” by The National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine for its interactivity to answer the questions above(Supporting emotional wellbeing in children: Calming your mind 2021). We are currently using this video in our learning resource targeted at helping young children manage their well-being and mental health. In the video, students are shown how to practice mindfulness using the 5-4-3-2-1 method. The video first starts by laying out a situation where the protagonist, Taylor, is distressed by a nearby fire they saw on the news. The video then goes on to show how mindfulness can help calm Taylor’s mind and how they can practice the 5-4-3-2-1 method to be mindful. When Taylor is practicing the 5-4-3-2-1 method, the audience is encouraged to follow along. After the main body of the video, the audience is urged to use the method they learned in the video whenever they are feeling scared or worried. When using this as a resource for designed learning, it would be helpful to have the students interact with the content they learned by having them practice the steps of the 5-4-3-2-1 method. By practicing the 5-4-3-2-1 method in real life, students would have the tools and knowledge to help them be mindful. After watching the video, students should be able to describe mindfulness, recall examples, and explain when mindfulness can help them. These criteria can help design assessments such as verbal quizzes and class discussions to be able to measure the knowledge gained by the students. Since our students are so young and mindfulness is quite subjective to experience, feedback can only really be in the form of verbal response, as it would be difficult to provide accurate individualized feedback for such an unstructured assessment. To provide accurate and comprehensive feedback based on such an unstructured assessment, would require an extreme amount of effort and resources to keep track of every student, especially as class sizes scaled. A class that I’ve found that struggles with this problem, are the physical education classes. These classes often only required that you participate willingly in the day’s activity for you to receive a good grade. If the goal of these classes was to improve the fitness of young people, it didn’t have a very accurate feedback system for achieving that goal, as anything comprehensive would have required massive amounts of resources.
In summary, creating interactive material that is accessible to young people is challenging when you are dealing with smaller children. Since children can’t engage with written media as effectively as other people, being able to provide feedback is limited to in-person communication, a medium that doesn’t scale well for larger class sizes.
Source(s):
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. (2021, September 15). Supporting emotional wellbeing in children: Calming your mind. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8k7ydvVtlE
Hi, I enjoyed your article, which explains in detail how interactive a video resource can be and how it can provoke student responses and thoughts. The article refers to a video about emotional well-being and describes activities students might do after viewing the video. The report also addresses ways to provide feedback on student activities, teacher workload, and scalability of activities. But I think you have some shortcomings, like the video could have been put directly in your Blog, or it would have given us a more direct view of the video you are talking about.
Hi Caelum! Thanks for sharing the “Supporting Emotional Wellbeing in Children: Calming Your Mind” video! I absolutely loved the storytelling style of the video and the fact that students can practice as they watch. This is particularly important for small kids, as they tend to learn better when they can interact with the content they’re receiving. I was just wondering, how do you encourage student-student interactions in your classroom?