Revista simpozionului Eficiență și calitate în educație - 19 mai 2017 Eficiență și calitate în educație | Page 44

USING VIDEOS IN CLASS:
A THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL APPROACH
Georgiana Mona Săvescu, Colegiul Național „Octavian Goga” Sibiu
Abstract:
Given the latest developments in teaching, which are in tight connection with the technological advances,
teachers must adapt to a new era, to new requirements, to completely diffrent students’ needs and
expectations. Moving with the times means teaching in such a way that students’ interest has little chances
of fading, and the best way of doing this is to provide them with resources that they find appealing, so that
they truly remain the focus of the teaching-learning process. The aim of this paper is to show how effective a
teaching tool videos can be, especially with high school students. The last part will provide examples of
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videos and their use in an optional course I teach to bilingual students in the 11 and 12 grades.
Key Words: video(s), multimedia, teaching-learning process, interest, motivation, technology, activity.
Motto: “I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system
and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks”.
(Thomas Edison, 1922)
Multimedia in the classroom has evolved rapidly, with a progression from audio cassettes
to internet sites in no more than a decade. The major advantage of such development is
that it offers teachers the opportunity to bring in images, sounds and videos, without the
need for the students to leave their classroom.
Videos, when relevant to one’s lesson, of course, add a new graphic and audio
component to teaching that captures attention, engages the audience and improves
retention, making the students more likely to recall information later on. Judging by the
success of online video channels, such as youtube.com, videos are something that the
young generation particularly like.
1. Why videos?
The experience of watching a video is nowadays undoubtedly superior to learning
using text, given the latest advances in technology and students’ interest in multimedia.
Due to the fact that our students feel more attracted to anything that has got to do with
technology, using videos in class will definitely be a more efficient alternative to traditional
teaching. What is more, by nature, videos are fantastically accessible media and the
strong connection they establish with the audience makes them a powerful teaching tool.
Statistics show that humans take in 70% of the information they both see and hear,
but only 20% of what they see and 30% of what they hear. This clearly shows that
traditional teaching materials lose ground on the issue of effective and powerful
communication of ideas and content.
From my experience, especially with older (17-18 year olds), advanced students (bilingual
classes with mainly B2/C1 levels), I can say that they retain more information, understand
concepts more rapidly, and most importantly, are more enthusiastic about what they are
learning. And, especially, in the Culture and Civilization classes that I teach, I find that
students’ enthusiasm is the key to success. By using videos, students learn while being
entertained and they consider these optional classes a pleasure rather than a burden.
2. How to use videos
The most important thing when using videos in class is not to fall into the trap of
considering that the use of technology or multimedia will just make the students learn and
be motivated. It is the learning activities that students perform with videos that are the
critical part of the learning outcomes and motivation. It is the teacher’s task to design a
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