Video |

Have you ever found the perfect YouTube video for class, only to realize that you do not have an internet connection in the classroom? Or, worse yet, the promise of a LAN or WiFi connection, but insufficient bandwidth to stream videos for your students. I know that I have been stuck up at the podium stalling for time more than once while students stared expectantly at a ‘buffering’ message…

Well, there is an easy solution to that. Rather than go to your desktop or laptop to download the video, only to struggle to find a way to copy it to your iPad, just open up YouTube.com in iCabMobile. iCabMobile, in case you have not noticed from previous posts, is my go-to browser on the iPad. One of the reasons I love it is that it allows for file downloads. This includes YouTube videos as well.

Watch the video below to see how it is done.

Homework: Download this video with iCabMobile and share it with your colleagues. ;^)

The Problem: How to collect, process, and disseminate videos of student performances in a language learning class while protecting student privacy and reducing workload.

The Solution: Camera.app, iCabMobile, and Moodle

Students capture the video themselves
Students access our Moodle course using the iCabMobile browser
Students upload their video to a forum with special permission settings

For sharing and archiving videos

The Background: One of the things I find important in education is that the assessment should always match the goals of the course. This is one reason why I have always found it rather silly to give students a 90-minute written exam in a conversation class. As such, for nearly ten years now I have concluded each semester of my conversation courses with conversation exams. These conversations were recorded on video for later assessment, and proved to be a bit of a logistical nightmare to process. Long story short, the teacher-hours required to process, assess, and disseminate were slowly convincing me to start giving paper-based tests again. While my colleagues and I had put a lot of thought into it, we had just not come up with a good way to get around the video processing issue while also protecting student privacy.

The Plan: The plan to overcome the teacher-centered nightmare is centered around the new iPad Classroom at our university. We have 20 new iPads set-up in the Media Center, our campus library, where I have been working to help establish the new iPad Classroom. This video project seemed like a great opportunity to have the students create something with the iPads while testing out their usability. The concept is fairly simple: read more »