How?
The process of video documentation comprises these steps:

1. Plan. Consider a lesson that you plan to teach during the next two weeks that might lend itself to video capture, or for which youre curious as to how your actions work in the classroom. Think about the aspects of the lesson that you want to be captured, with special attention to any particular techniques or activities that should be documented closely. What are the key competencies or skills you want to show? When will they happen in the lesson? What images, and what sounds, are essential to communicating these key ideas? Think through camera and microphone placement and shooting angles. Jot down an outline of the objectives and methods of the capture session: what do you want to capture, and why?
    
   If you have a co-conspirator for your video session -- a colleague, a student, a supervisor -- let them in on your planning. And ask them to serve as videographer. This can help to produce a more interesting, customized result.
    
2. Practice. To de-sensitize students and their teacher to the presence of the camera and to test the process of video capture, it's a good idea to shoot some practice video. Choose a lesson that fits well with video capture, think through the camera placement, and explain to students what you are about to do and why. Shoot a few minutes of video, and then analyze it after school. How's the video? How's the sound? How would you capture it differently next time?
    
3. Setup. Proper setup of the capture will result in higher-quality video. For example:
   • Camera placement is crucial. You can't just point and shoot and get useful results. Attention must be paid, especially to how you point the camera. And use a tripod, even if you have a friend shooting by hand.
   • No single physical setup will suffice for all situations. The setup must be tailored to the physical nature of each classroom and the type of teaching and learning situation that you want to document. For instance, to document yourself working around a table with a small group of students in a peer-editing situation, you need to set up for a close shot, get the camera as close as possible to the table, and know how you plan to carry out the session so you can capture the relevant sequences.
   • Think ahead. Before you begin shooting, you need to have in mind what you want the completed video to look like: do you want to capture the look in the students' faces? The text on the pages in front of them? The teacher's gestures? How long will the completed clip be?
   • Audio is more important than video. More teacher videos fail because you can't hear what's happening, than any other cause. For example, if you want to document and analyze your oral instructions, you should set the camera up a few feet away, or clip a microphone to your shirt. If you want to capture student voices, put the camera very close to them or use an external microphone. Otherwise they will be inaudible. If an external mike is not available, keep the camera less than three feet away from the speaker. If the camera is beyond arm's length, the voice will not come across clearly.
   • Learn about light. Shoot so that your subjects are lit from the front. Never, never shoot into the classroom windows. Shoot with the light behind the camera.
   • Close in. Most classroom videos are shot much too wide to be useful or interesting. If you have a friend operating the camera for you, tell them to pretend to be a cameraperson for 60 minutes, trying to capture the beads of sweat on your forehead.
   • Charge up. Charge the camera's battery fully the night before you shoot. Make sure you have the tripod and the memory card.
      
4. Capture. Consider capturing part of the lesson from one angle, and other parts from other angles. This is easier if you have a helper to operate the camera. You may want to capture the entire classroom environment, or capture close-up certain parts of the lesson. Move the camera as necessary to capture the essentials of the session as it proceeds. Use a tripod whenever possible. Avoid quick zooms and pans. Avoid using the zoom feature of the camera -- instead, move the camera closer to the action. Here are the steps to follow:
   
   1. Mount the camcorder on a tripod (and connect the external microphone if you have one.)
   2. Open the display door and remove the lens cover from the camera.
   3. Set the Play/Record button to Record.
   4. Press the record button to start the recording.
   5. Move around and speak to test the capture.
   6. Press the record button again to stop the recording.
   7. Set the Play/Record button to the Play setting,..
   8. Press the play button and review what you shot.
   9. If you are happy with the results, repeat steps 3, 4, and 5.
   10. While recording, keep the room quiet and don't touch the camera or tripod.
    
5. Computerize. Transfer the video to your computer for viewing, editing, and uploading. Take the memory card out of the camera, put it into the card ready, and insert the card reader into your computer. The video will appear on the card as an .MP4 file. Copy this file to your computer by clicking and dragging it across. On your computer, you can view the file easily, stopping and starting and rewinding as necessary. From the computer you may also upload the video to a video analysis server, if one is available.
    
6. Analyze. With your objectives in front of you, watch the captured video clip. You will see things you never considered. You may, if you haven't done this before, be surprised at how you look and sound on the small screen. Analyze your actions and the reactions of students in light of the objectives of your lesson. Examine closely those aspects of your teaching that you wanted to focus on.
    
   If you are working with a supervisor, consider a joint review and analysis of the video. Independently review the session and prepare summaries of the video in light of the objectives of the lesson and of the principles of teaching under review. Then meet to watch the video together, share your analyses, and discuss how you might improve your teaching.
    
7. Archive
   A simple review and analysis may suffice for you, but you may also want to develop an archive of your practice. It's easy to make copies of your clips onto DVD, onto your computer, or on web server for later retrieval. Many teachers combine selected clips from classroom videos into a DVD suitable for use as a portfolio.

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by James Lengel, Hunter College School of Education, 10/24/2007

The lead article in the business section of today's New York Times described how podcasting is reshaping the nature of the evening news. According to the Times, "Executives at the broadcast networks know they have opportunities online that they do not have on television - namely, to take chances by testing new forms of news delivery and new types of storytelling." Posting news on the web has evolved new forms of expression and new ways of telling the news that were never possible with newspapers, radio or television.

Over the course of 20 months, the Webcast has evolved from a basic distillation of the day's news into an original program that incorporates video blogs, first-person essays and interviews. It covers many of the same stories as its television sibling, but often in a different way: in one example, the day after President Bush announced gradual troop cuts in Iraq, Mr. Gibson was shown debriefing the network's chief White House correspondent, Martha Raddatz, in the Webcast for a full 3 minutes and 20 seconds - an eternity on a half-hour television newscast.

More and more people are getting their news from the web, in the form of pages and podcasts, while fewer and fewer read it in the newspaper or watch it on television. ABC reports 4.5 million downloads a month, most by people using iTunes to subscribe automatically to podcasts. News executives describe this trend "as a first step toward a future that looks increasingly digital and multimedia." To see and hear an example, connect to ABC World News.

For the news media, the possibility of podcasting has opened up new forms of expression, and a more effective way of communicating the news. The digital nature of the technology has allowed news reporters more creativity and freedom, and provided news consumers with more choices.

Push vs. Pull

News on radio and television is pushed toward consumers in a single stream, identical for all, in the same order, for short amounts of time, in more or less the same style. News on the web is pulled by consumers from a wide array of possibilities, customized to their interests, for as long as they like, in a variety of styles. Push media tend toward short, shallow, and similar stories, while pull media exhibit more variety, often with more depth and length. ABC News is finding both commercial success and journalistic strength in the web-delivered, digital, pull media.

Old vs. Young

According to the Times, "the ABC Webcast is an entirely different animal, sometimes resembling a younger, more technologically advanced version of the traditional 6:30 p.m. report. It is intended in part for people who view Web pages on iPods and cellphones, and ABC executives say they are deliberately aiming to please the 25- to 54-year-olds whom every news organization covets." These are the same people who read very few newspapers and seem to be watching less television. Podcasting and other web-delivered formats seem to fit better into the fabric of their lives.

Media vs. Message

Filebusters
by James G. Lengel, Hunter College School of Education, 01/28/2008

Vignette #1

The students had completed their slide show tracing the dissemination of Islamic art forms through areas of Spain and France in the 11th - 13th centuries. Replete with animated maps and photographic examples, the slide show supported their well-researched spoken narrative on this topic. Now it was time to post the PowerPoint slide show to the class web site.

With the help of their professor, they uploaded the slide show...but it did not make it. The system told them it would take six hours to upload the file! (And so, of course, it would take anyone wishing to view the file the same six hours to download it.) This was not what they were aiming at.

Vignette #2

The kindergartners' beautifully-published books on animal habitats were a big hit at the PTA Curriculum Fair. Printed in full color on glossy paper in a hardback binding, they told the story, in words and pictures, of adaptation, predation, and protection. The students used iPhoto to create the book, based on extensive online research, original photography, group discussion, and serious composition. Now it was time to provide a copy for each student.

But not every family had the iPhoto application on their computer at home, nor did the school have a .Mac account that would have allowed easy uploading and viewing of the book over the Web.

Vignette #3

The three faculty members had worked long and hard to prepare the grant proposal. They each sent their narratives, supporting research papers, and curriculum vitae to the grants manager, all in the form of Microsoft Word documents. As the grants manager compiled the final copy for submission, he noticed that some of the tables looked a little odd, and he remembered seeing a pop-up window warning of some missing fonts. But he'd learned to ignore all those pop-up windows, and so thought nothing of it.

Their proposal was rejected, on the grounds that two crucial data tables were indecipherable to the grant-review committee. The main ideas on the proposal were quite sound, remarked the committee, but the garbled tables did not allow them to see the results of the previous research.

Who are you going to call?

All three of the educators described in these vignettes have problems with their files: they are either too big, too strange, or too messed up to be useful. What they need is the digital equivalent of Ghostbusters, perhaps called Filebusters, to come in and save the day. Most computer-using teachers and students have at one time or another confronted issues such as these, where the files just don't work for the intended educational purpose. And a few have discovered a solution that applies in many similar situations, called Portable Document Format, or PDF.

The PDF format was pioneered by the Adobe company to make it possible to publish a document that would be eminently readable, and nicely printable, no matter what kind of computer you displayed it on, or printer you printed it on, or software you used to view it. And once published by the author, a PDF document could not be altered by the reader. This format was based in part on on Adobe's patented PostScript technology, which is used in many printers and some computer displays.

Here's how PDF could have helped our three disabled digerati:

Had the students of Islamic art saved their slide show in a properly compressed PDF format, it would have been small enough for posting to and downloading from the school web site. That's because the PDF format saves only the information it needs to display the slides on a computer with standard resolution. PowerPoint, on the other hand, saves the full resolution of each image in the slide show, which can amount to many megabytes of unnecessary pixels. And just about everybody has a PDF reader on their computer -- most are free or built in. But not everyone has the latest version of PowerPoint, which must be purchased. So PDF is concise.

Had the kindergartners exported their iPhoto books in PDF format, they could easily have been distributed over the web or on CD, and displayed on any type of computer, with or without iPhoto. From the PDF file, the books could be printed at home, or read directly from the computer screen. In full color. Or emailed to grandma in Texas. PDF is compatible.

Had the faculty members submitted their grant application in PDF format, it would have been much less likely to become contaminated by subsequent reviewers, and much more likely to display exactly as desired no matter what kind of computer or printer was used by the reader. That's because PDF files are not alterable by most grant mangers or reviewers, as Word files are. PDF is consistent.

How to save in PDF

You may need to save your own publications in the PDF format. Here's how:

• On Apple Macintosh, it's easy and built in. No matter which program you are using, choose from the menubar File --> Print. Then, in the Print dialog box, click the PDF button in the lower left corner. You'll get a choice of dispositions: Save as PDF, Compress PDF, and so forth. For the situations described above, Save or Compress would have been the best choices. This process creates a new file on your computer, in PDF format.
   
• On Windows and Linux, you'll need to install a PDF-saving utility on your computer, and then follow its directions to convert your documents to the Portable Document Format. A search on PDF utilities for Windows will point you to several free and paid programs for this purpose.

Once saved in PDF format, these files can be distributed by all of the means at your digital disposal:

• You can attach the PDF file to on email, and end it to your correspondents with the confidence that it's concise enough to pass the email file size censor, compatible enough to be read by all, in a consistent format.
   
• You can copy the PDF file to a compact disc, or flash memory stick, and let your public copy them from there to their own computers with the same confidence.

You can post the PDF file to a web site, knowing at all web servers know how to send out this format, and all web browsers know how to send it to the PDF reader to display it. Just as you published it.

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