Using video: Development Activities

These are activities which encourage the learners to use English in order to develop their own videos based on the ones they’ve been watching. The aim is to get the students to revisit what they have watched to deepen their understanding of it before developing a related video of their own.

Here are some suggestions for possible video projects:

1. Learners could make a video clip about their local club and interview some of their friends to find out what they think about the club.

2. You could get your students to make a video about their favourite Premier League club and what people in your learners’ country do to support and follow them.

3. Try to interview a player from the club. Learners could produce their own interview questions for a player and then other students could imagine being the player and be interviewed. They could even do some research to answer the questions.

4. Make a video of a short section of a local match and write their own commentary to go with it.

Procedure 

Procedure for setting the activities

1. See if your learners can create a short storyboard of the video they have watched. The storyboard should be a series of roughly drawn sketches showing the basic action of each scene of the model video they watched. They can then use these sketches to provide the structure for their own video production.

2. Ask your students to outline the main characteristics of the genre of the video they watched.

Procedure for using the activities

1. Make sure students work together in small groups or pairs on these projects. You might also want to create a number of roles, such as cameraman, interviewer, director etc and get the students to decide which ones they want to be within the group.

2. Students could use a webcam on a computer or a hand held video camera or digital camera (most digital cameras can also make short video clips) if they have access to them or even the camera on a mobile phone.

3. You could create your own free channel on a website like YouTube, Teacher Tube or Vimeo and upload your students' videos to the channel so they could watch and share them online. Or if you don’t have a good internet connection you could just collect them on your computer hard drive and have a video show at the end of term or the end of the week.