Internet Learning Volume 5, Number 1, Fall 2016/Winter 2017 | Page 62

Teach like a Video Journalist Thinks
audience gives long-life impact to the
long-life video.
Note a word about level of performance.
On a theatre or lecture stage
an actor needs to communicate with
the audience and hold attention. An inspirational
presenter knows that expansive
hand gestures, strong facial expressions,
and sweeping head movements
are essential tools of the trade. However,
the camera, framing the individual
in a close up, cannot cope with these
movements. The result is the performer
appears to be greatly over-acting. The
camera lens must stay back, instead of
being close in to the action. The reason
is that that a wider angle distance shot
is required to stop the speaker from disappearing
out of the picture. Unnoticed
to the enthralled live audience, this can
be a shock to the live feed viewer as it
is a big distraction to the flow of argument,
and captured for all time in the
online video. The camera likes a minimum
of expression, the merest raise
of eyebrow, little foot movement, with
hand gestures close to the body. The
stress on a key word; a lean forward; a
quiet word, delivered after a pause; have
greater effect. Anything else appears
“over the top”. Understanding level of
performance is a skill of the trade.
There are some speakers who can
hold the attention of a large audience
within these constraints. For normal
mortals something between the two extremes
will suffice. Lecturers may not
be aware that it is possible to work with
both a live audience as well as the video
camera. These tricks of the trade might
make a real change to the student learning
experience in the lecture theatre, for
MOOCs and for use as a long-life video
resource.
Talking to Students in
Online Video
All of the above pointers about
presentation style apply to
talking to students generally,
and specifically in giving personal video
feedback about their work. The feedback
is only provided on a few sentence
examples for analysis. This is because
students invariably repeat the errors in
style over and over again, hiding perfectly
good ideas and arguments. The
structure of the feedback session includes
a routine of first providing a full
frame camera view welcome for the
student, and then a list of the items to
be examined before switching the full
frame camera view off to reveal the student’s
writing on screen. The iShowU
Instant software highlights the drag
of the mouse and puts mouse clicks in
a circle on the screen with color. Text
of course can be reordered and more
suitable sentence constructions can be
created. The sequence ends with the
full frame camera again along with a
summary and cheery goodbye. Set parameters
for a video duration of 3–7
minutes. Make a strict rule to confine
comments on camera to the academic
tasks and only use positive and constructive
language. Any other student
issues are dealt with through the usual
channels.
61