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Tech Talk
Videos in teaching and learning: analyzing the where, how and why of a limitlessly growing resource Lucius Von Joo Kanda University of International Studies, Japan Lucius Von Joo currently teaches at Kanda University of International Studies, Japan. He holds an EdM in Comparative and International Education and has teaching experience in deaf education, elementary education and EFL/ESL in California, Japan and New York. His research interests include computer assisted learning, film and documentary content-based learning, student educational backgrounds and learning approaches, video-cued multi-vocal ethnography, and family and communities as educators. E-mail: lucius-v@kanda.kuis.ac.jp
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hen I first considered a Tech Talk on using and finding videos, my initial thought was that, though it is a much needed skill, there might not be enough to say on the subject. However, when I started to consider the options, tricks and reasons for getting access to videos I realized there was more than enough. The growing online library of videos currently at our fingertips offers endless prompts for learning and teaching. Video forums have changed greatly as well, allowing the viewer to become a part of the medium. This allows for countless ways to actively utilize videos in the classroom; in this Tech Talk I will mention a few of these, as well as techniques for accessing and using videos in general. I will cover sites that host videos; how to navigate and find the video you want; helpful mobile applications and a few examples of uses for videos in teaching and learning.
Hosting Sites (the where) The top 3 free video sites that are currently recognized internationally are YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo. YouTube is the largest but was not the first. The site carries over a billion videos and is fairly easy to navigate and find what you want. It is worth mentioning that Dailymotion and Vimeo both have over a hundred million videos as well. Dailymotion is actually older than YouTube but does not house as many videos. Although the two sites are very similar, Dailymotion might be a little easier to navigate and has been banned in fewer countries in the past, whereas YouTube is a much larger resource. Finally, Vimeo focuses on quality rather than quantity and the videos tend to be short films as opposed to videos of cats playing the piano, (not that those videos aren’t useful in their own way). In addition, each country may have its own video-hosting site, which can be useful to tap into. For example, in Japan, where I teach, the video hosting site ‘FC2’ is very popular. When I wanted to show the documentary ‘The Corporation’ to my students, I was able to find the movie with Japanese subtitles on FC2. Country specific video sites are a smaller resource and can be limiting when you are teaching EFL. Each of these sites can be utilized for different reasons, for example when I typed in the term ‘ESL lesson’ to the 3 hosts I got over 1,000,000 videos with YouTube, around 75,000 with Dailymotion and 331 with Vimeo. Basically,
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YouTube and Dailymotion allow any copyright free content to be uploaded, whereas Vimeo has more of a selection process. To summarize, for the purposes of finding something that suits any imagined need I would use YouTube; Vimeo is a great resource if you want to have more uniquely authored videos, and Dailymotion is a good alternative to YouTube if for some reason YouTube is not available or proves too overwhelming. Navigation (the how) All three video hosting sites mentioned have a filter system in place to help you find the video that best suits your needs. Remember that YouTube has a billion unique videos and so when you type a term or word into the search bar, YouTube sorts through a library that is one seventh the size of the human race! Just to put that in perspective, if you sat down to count from one to one billion, you would be counting for about 95 years. Needless to say, you won’t always get what you need or want. In this next section I will discuss how to navigate the top 3 video hosts as well as the use of Google as a search engine for videos. YouTube Because YouTube is connected with Google, some default settings may come up in your Google account if you are logged in. These would probably be in the form of videos being listed on the landing page that follow a pattern of what you have viewed in the past. For the purposes of this tutorial, I will explain the navigation without any log in. When you first log onto YouTube you will see a page very much like this one:
The videos on the main page show what is trending at the moment, or what is most heavily sponsored by Google. On the sidebar you will see general categories of video. At the top of the page you will see a search bar where you can type in a word or term to describe a video that you are looking for. Whatever you type in the search bar will access both the title and a description of the video, as well as tag words that the author of the video may have typed in to make the video come up in a search. So, for example, if I authored and uploaded a video of an egg throwing contest, I
might type in the tag words: egg, toss, game, activity, messy, accident, funny, and any other term that fits the video. That means that if you type in any of the words I have tagged, my video will come up in your search. So if you typed in the term ‘funny activity’ my video will come up as well as many others. The problem is, you may not have any use for an egg throwing contest video! Just as with all Internet searches, it is important that you try many different search terms while hunting for the media that fits your needs. The first filters that you may want to personalize are the general filters of YouTube, which you can find at the bottom of the page. These are: Language, Country, and Safety. The language option will change only the operating language and should not alter the videos that come up.
In contrast, the country filter will affect what videos appear according to what is most popular for the country chosen, this country is often set automatically to where the computer and internet connection are being used. You can also choose a worldwide option based on an analysis of watched statistics around the world. The last option to be aware of is the ‘Safety mode’ filter, which is like a parental control that flags agerestricted content. The filter is managed by video authors, YouTube and the YouTube community flagging videos. It is not 100 percent accurate, but it most videos that have vulgar language, violence, nudity or dangerous activities are filtered. If the safety filter is activated for the Google account being used, this will, by default, be set in YouTube since the video host is owned by Google. Some schools and libraries have this set on all in-house computers. Now that you have your basic filters set it is time to look at search specific filters. First you type in a search word or term that you want to find a video for. For this example I have typed in the term ‘ESL lesson’ and as mentioned before, this brings up over a million videos. You can then open the filter tab to help refine your search.
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This will give you the following filter options:
Filtering by ‘Upload date’ is often helpful when you are looking for anything that is time sensitive, such as tutorials about current technology, or an event that just recently happened. For example, if you type in the word ‘earthquake’ and limit the upload date it may give matches to more contemporary events. The next filter is ‘Type’: this is useful when you want to find a series or movie on a particular topic. ‘Show’ will give you results on reoccurring shows produced or edited by the same author, for example for the term I searched for it might give me a weekly show on grammar. This a new filter, so it will yield few results at the time of this article, however, in the past many people who made a show on a recurring theme used ‘Playlists’. Any user can make a Playlist, whether they are the original author of the video or not. These lists can be formed for any reason the user chooses, but are more often than not grouped by genre, interests, or topic. These lists are much like the playlists people make of the music they like. ‘Duration’ refers to the length of videos and comes in handy when looking for shows or movies on a topic that you want to share with students. The most useful ESL aspect of the ‘Feature’ filter is ‘SubtitlesCC’. This will find all the videos that have captions entered by a human and are sometimes offered in multiple languages. In the case of my search, it reduced the ‘found’ videos to 8,000. However, it is important to mention that most videos can also have captions added by YouTube’s beta Automatic Caption option which can be accessed through the cog.
This means that the computer takes the audio
track and puts it into text, in much the same way as any speech to text program. This is by no means a foolproof captioning system, but it can often get the general idea across. For example, in the previous example screen capture, the first words the speaker said were ‘so in’. However, as you can see in the sub-title, the captioning program recognized it as ‘send’. I have found that the automated captioning program works especially well for videos that have no background sound and a single person narrating with an American accent. The last filter you can choose does not eliminate videos, it only sorts your search results. The categories are: • Relevance (based on your search word) • Upload date (to find most recent videos) • View count (to find the most viewed videos) • Rating (to find the highest-rated videos) ‘Upload date’ means exactly what it says, however, remember that a recently-uploaded video may have been made at an earlier date. The ‘View count’ and ‘Ratings’ sorting options will yield the most popular videos but may also take you far from the topic you originally searched for. Dailymotion As I mentioned before, Dailymotion and YouTube are very similar even in the way the two sites filter videos. As with YouTube, if you scroll to the bottom of the page you can change the general filters ‘Age Gate’, and the ‘Country’. ‘Country’ will change both the language and videos origin at the same time. This is less functional than YouTube, which separates language and region into two different filter categories. Next type the word or term into the search bar and after the videos come up you need to choose video or channels to do further filtering.
For this explanation I chose videos. Next you can sort by: • Most viewed • Most recent (determined by upload date) • Relevance (which is set by default)
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You can then filter by: • HD content • Paid • Live Live videos are rare at this point, however, if this becomes more common this could be a nice classroom resource or even a way to stream a live lecture to students like Ustream does. The last two filters are genre and language. Both of these filters would be based on what the original author of the uploaded video chose when uploading, so the accuracy is subject to each author’s choice.
Searching Vimeo Overall the experience with Vimeo is a little nicer because it is almost ad free. YouTube has advertisements at the beginning of many videos and Dailymotion has banner ads. Vimeo’s main advertisement is for itself, asking for people to join, however you can still search and watch videos without being a member. When you first log onto the Vimeo site you will see the advertisement to join. You can just type in the word or term you are looking for here.
You can also change the operating language of the site at the bottom of the page. This will not change what videos come up in the search. Next you can choose to sort your results by: • Relevance (based on your search word) • Date (upload date) • Alphabetical (not sure when this would help) • Plays (viewer frequency) • Likes (if viewers like the video or not) • Comments (talked about a lot) • Duration
You can also go into Advanced Filters of Vimeo which are pretty self-explanatory and give you a
great deal of control when filtering your results. It is too bad that YouTube, with its gigantic library of videos, does not have this precision filtering.
Downloadability is one really helpful option which downloads the video to be watched on any video player. When I clicked this filter option in my search, 228 of the 331 videos that came up for ‘ESL Lesson’ were downloadable. This could be a major asset for situations where learners do not always have access to an Internet connection. Google Video search The last search method I would like to mention is the use of the video tab in a general Google search.
After clicking on ‘Videos’, click ‘Search tools’. You will then be able to filter your results very much like the specific hosting videos sites. mentioned. Duration, time and quality are the same. You can choose captioned videos just like with YouTube. The last filter is ‘Source’, which will vary depending on your search results. It is important to understand that Google is only searching other video-hosting sites and is not
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itself a Host. The general Google search is useful, however, what Google will include as a video is very flexible. For example, any ‘Prezi’ slideshow will come up in your results. This means that you may be getting a lot more results than you want. For example, in the search for ‘ESL Lesson’ I got 11,000,000 results. Bonus tip Control the play speed of a video, which can really help scaffold comprehension for students listening to videos in their L2. You can do this using the Google Chrome browser with YouTube or you can go to this website: http://www.youtubeslow.com/ and paste in the video url. Mobile Applications With over 1 million applications for Apple and 1.5 million for Android devices, finding an application for watching videos is not difficult. However, finding an application that is reliable and has features that can assist language learners may be a little harder. Below I list a few applications that I have tested and used with students which have stood the test of time. I have also listed some of the key features that I believe are the best points of these applications, so even if you want to look further in your ‘app’ search, I hope the mention of these features helps. YouTube for ios for android As the name of this app suggests this is YouTube’s proprietary application, which means it does not work for other video hosting sites, and also comes with all the advertising YouTube has to offer. The application’s options are similar to the website version. Currently, the playspeed option that is offered in the online version of YouTube is not offered within the app. The Closed caption option can be accessed via the 3 dots in the top corner of any video while it is playing.
Both Dailymotion and Vimeo also offer Proprietary applications as well, although they are a bit more limiting. PlayTube for ios for android This is a simple alternative to the proprietary version which does not have advertisements before video play. However, on the free version of this app there are banner and pop up ads. The best points of this app are that you can change the play speed and it will soon offer caption support. PlayTube also allows you to play videos in the background of other applications on your device or even switch off the screen, which could enable the YouTube media to be used for audio only. Instatube 2 for ios for android Costs around $3 (US), which allows the app to be completely advertisement free. There is no free version of this application, however the application has all three video websites in one application and videos can be saved to view offline, which is nice for tablet users or anyone without a constant Internet connection. This application also allows videos to be played in the background as well as offering many other personalizing options. Android’s interface of this application is a little different from the image below but runs in basically the same way.
Swift player for ios This application is worth mentioning as it specializes in the specific task of play speed. The app allows you to control the speed of any video from the three video hosts as well as Ted talks. The range of speed is between 0.25-3 times the speed of the original video. When you slow down video, the frame rate often jumps, this application does a good job of smoothing out the jumpiness in both image and sound. Uses for teaching and learning (the why) Videos as media offer so much stimuli that it is hard not to see the practicality for learning, however videos can also create a passive learning environment or just an overall distraction. For example, while I was
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researching the video hosting sites for this article I am sure I spent at least 10% of my time clicking on videos that carried me down rabbit holes far from subject of this tech talk. The 3 main purposes I use videos for in my classes are exploration, practice, and stimulus cues. Exploration: Basically any topic or idea you can think of has an existing library of videos. In my classes I have used videos for exploration for unfamiliar topics using a scavenger hunt approach. I create a general term that follows the current classroom topic and set students to find and share their results. For example, when looking at advertisements I had students find 3 examples of product placement. The ‘general term’ tactic allows the task to be used again at a later time since the question will not become outdated. Looking through videos as a class and creating a shared document or collating the videos students find helps create a co-constructed classroom. For example, when my class was analyzing pop culture and language, I made a shared Google doc where the students wrote the name of a pop song from around the world, the video link and country of origin. The only rule I mentioned was that we couldn’t repeat the same country twice. I really like getting a body of videos together as a class and always have a debriefing session about the varied techniques we used for searching, as this metacognitive strategy will carry over to our group’s learning. Practice: The obvious thing that comes to mind is videos that give examples of accent, pronunciation and vocabulary. I have in the past used this basic activity as a warm up in which students seek out online series that they can interact with, forming learning habits which can potentially carry on after the class. Tutorials are also an endless resource, from cooking shows to ‘how to build an igloo’. Using videos in this manner gives students the chance to personalize the lesson to suit their interests. It also provides very clear visual aids of what the speaker is referring to, unlike the experience of watching a drama in which dialogue could cover any topic without offering any visual cues. Cues: Any video can be a launching point for conversation or interaction. Basically, when using the video as a cue you can turn it from a lecture to a seminar when the viewer is participating. I have done this as a warm-up in class or used a virtual comment log.
Summing up There are some overall benefits to (a systematic approach to) using videos in the classroom: 1. As I mentioned before, videos provide an endlessly growing resource that is currently being produced by more authors than imaginable, allowing learners to access unique materials. 2. The ability to manipulate videos online really puts the learner at an advantage. The fact that the user can find closed captions or change the rate of speech is an amazing scaffolding tool that can be turned on or off with the click of a button. 3. Practicing navigation skills and strategies on how to interact with the growing number of video resources aids in allowing learners to become more comfortable and efficient with the media around them. 4. Videos are more than likely going to continue to be a lifelong resource for autonomous learning, long after students leave any formal learning environment. Possible limitations 1. The only criteria YouTube has for uploaded videos is that they do not infringe on copyrights and are free from pornography. Other than that, anything can be and is uploaded, which means there is a great deal of time used on sifting and distraction. Vimeo has stricter criteria, but those criteria might not fit every user or need. However, as mentioned in the benefits, the information is there and going to be explored, so teaching methods of negotiating all this to learners is also very valuable. 2. Videos crash, are not accessible, or may be deleted and taken down at any time. Consistency of use may pose a major problem. Open up a really useful video you have used in a former semester or even prior week and you may get the message “this video has been removed.” Final Remarks Video is an exponentially growing media that is now created and published by more members of the world than ever before. This is both exhilarating and daunting. Think of the difference between a shared reel-to-reel in the classroom in the past versus the private and vast intake of videos we have now. As learners, we may spend more time with screens than in face-to-face interactions and there is no doubt we are changed by this. Learning techniques for interacting with this media allows for it to go from a hot single sense interaction to a cool multimodal one, acting as a launching point for learning versus an all-encompassing form of
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passive entertainment. In the last decade alone I have watched the video world transform my personal teaching methods as well as the field at large. I feel that, overall, videos are a functional resource when filtered, personalized and built upon for each learner.
Dear Readers,
If you have any requests for future Tech Talks please feel free to contact me. Any request is greatly appreciated and can range from a specific program you want explained to a general lesson that you want to incorporate technology into.
Thank you, lucius-v@kanda.kuis.ac.jp
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