Mitosis Video

I spent an afternoon drawing out the pictures and then videotaped myself in an attempt to do a Science in Plain English talk about mitosis. I didn't have a tripod, but it worked ok to just use my digital camera on the video setting. I gave it a few tries, and was satisfied with the last take, considering that I was talking, moving the pictures, and doing the taping myself. :)

Getting the video from the camera to my laptop was easy, uploading the video took some time. The screen showed that my video was uploading, but well over 30 minutes later, I could not publish my post because that would cancel the video upload. I finally became impatient, and opted to re-record my video, changing the setting on my camera from tv movie to small size. I thought the problem could be that my first video was too large a file to upload. The second video I tried to upload was much smaller. This video still took well over 20 minutes, and still did not upload. I then decided to import the video file into windows movie maker to try to condense to an even smaller file in hopes that it would upload. This time, the file uploaded within a few minutes, but when I looked at the preview of my video, there was a black box with a red x. I will need to figure out how to speed up the uploading process before I use it in my classroom.

From having done the activity myself, I think students would have a lot of fun completing a similar project. I also feel that through the process of making the pictures and deciding what to say about each one, students would better understand the subject matter because creating the video encourages the student to focus on what is going on and what is important. I think the implications for using this activity would be great for clarifying many concepts and also incorporates some of the 21st century learning skills, where students use technology collaboratively to create new products.