Teachers have been focusing on the powerful benefits of video-based learning at this year’s Scottish Government-backed education conference.
The virtual Scottish Learning Festival (SLF), which kicked off on Tuesday 21 September and will end tomorrow, is delivering free workshops on video-based learning, which is proven to stimulate the imagination, enhance involvement with text, and improve mental imagery.
After a year when lockdown proved the benefits of videos content in the classroom, two of the core seminars at the three-day event is offering ideas and advice to teachers on harnessing the full potential of digital learning.
Both will be available to watch on-demand for a month after the virtual Scottish Learning festival, which is run by Education Scotland.
The first session, entitled “The Power of Educational Videos”, took place today. The Edinburgh City Council team offered advice and recommendations from an authority, school and practitioner perspective, on integrating video content into the learning environment.
A panel session during the seminar debated highly effective ways of implementing video content into student development through wider curriculum areas including developing the young workforce (DYW), personal and social education (PSE) and health and wellbeing.
The panel included Joanna Maclean, Scottish educator, researcher and learning designer, William Brown, West OS development officer and digital learning officer at Inverclyde Council, and David McKee, quality improvement education officer for digital learning at City of Edinburgh Council.
It also featured Simon Luxford-Moore, head of eLearning at ESMS, and Kevan Scade, learning resources technologist at Ayrshire College.
Luxford-Moore said: “The benefits of visualisation are not new. Like many learners, Albert Einstein said ‘if I can’t picture it, I can’t understand it,’ and Aristotle added that ‘it is impossible even to think without a mental picture’.
“This has never been more true than during lockdown. We are increasingly recognising that short, curriculum aligned videos stimulate the students’ imagination, enhance involvement with the text, and improve mental imagery. It delivers learning in a format that matches today’s students preferred way of consuming information.”
A second webinar at the SLF is a part of the event’s “Fringe On Demand” series and will be delivered by highly respected historian and content expert, Carmel Bones whose 30-minute session will offer teachers advice on “Captivating your classroom with Video”.
The workshop will provide practical pedagogical examples of how teachers can captivate their students with Curriculum for Excellence-aligned video content.
Bones is a member of the Historical Association’s national secondary committee and a consulting editor for many leading resource providers.
She recently wrote the new BBC Bitesize material and leads workshops at the annual Historical Association and Schools History Project Conferences.
Bones also works with teachers across Scotland to achieve short term gains as well as long-term results.