Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning (VITAL)
Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning (VITAL)
Monday, February 25, 2008
Herbert Ginsburg: Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning (VITAL) is a Web-based video analysis system that enables students to view, edit, and communicate ideas with video. Students view videos embedded in an online course curriculum, analyze their content, comment on the content in essays in which they can add clips of video as reference points, and submit these essays to their instructor for review and feedback. VITAL is also used as a self-assessment tool in which student teachers upload videotapes of their own teaching for self-reflection and sharing with mentors and peers.
VITAL encourages students to think critically about the content they see in videos, and to generate complex learning products called “multimedia essays.” Our underlying hypothesis is that the use of the tool, with its emphasis on close viewing of concrete examples of children’s thinking, interviewing techniques, and teaching practice, aids in the development of the ability to use direct evidence to support theoretical analysis. The further underlying assumption is that the ability to ground theory in evidence increases the teacher’s belief in the usefulness of theory in practice and makes it a more solid foundation for pedagogical decision-making.
The short term outcomes, changes that might be discernable by instructors and students in the courses, could be the degree of close viewing engaged in by students (i.e. how appropriate the clips are to the argument they are illustrating in essays), any change in the degree or nature of the reflections students share with their instructors and each other (e.g., class discussions), and change in the depth of the students’ insight.
The long term outcomes are hypothesized to be teachers who are better prepared for teaching practice and whose teaching skills have improved as a result of their deeper understanding of the subject matter and their opportunities to conduct more in-depth virtual observations.
The evaluation of the technology itself has as its focus the extent to which students are able to demonstrate their ability to analyze video segments closely and to use the Web environment to enhance their own learning process.
The VITAL project is currently the recipient of a $2.3 million NSF grant to contribute to the improvement of early childhood mathematics education nationwide by creating model courses for colleges and universities. The content and methodology are based on mathematics education courses taught by Prof. Herbert Ginsburg (Co-PI) at Teachers College, Columbia University. The courses employ learning activities using video cases to help prospective and practicing teachers to understand the development of young children’s mathematical thinking and learning, and to analyze the thinking and learning of individual children. The learning activities help prepare teachers to more critically examine early mathematics instruction and to develop pedagogical approaches based on an understanding of children’s mathematical cognition. The VITAL project will provide faculty at other institutions with the means to adapt their existing courses and to create new courses and course modules based on our model.
The bottom line: we use video to help prospective teachers to learn to observe, interpret and think critically about children’s mathematical behavior and thinking, and about teaching. We believe that the work helps to make mathematics learning and teaching personally meaningful for our university students.
Project website:
http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/vital/nsf/
Demonstration of features:
http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/vital/nsf/environment.html
Publications/presentations:
http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/vital/nsf/publications.html
Article: Analyzing Videos to Learn to Think Like an Expert Teacher
http://journal.naeyc.org/btj/200707/pdf/Lee.pdf
Grant Project Description