Abstract:

Video training has become more accessible through the spread of mobile computing devices such as tablet computers and smart phones which make video recording easy and simple. This calls for new methods of applying videos in learning. The potential of videos and case-based learning has been widely recognized in the context of teacher education. The videos are especially useful in student teachers’ construction of action-oriented knowledge. Explication of practice and formation of students’ action-oriented knowledge become more successful when guided through reflection. Reflection, however, can be effectively supported by use of videos that help to situate learning, explicate tacit understandings, develop habits of reflection, improve self-awareness, integrate theoretical and practical understandings, and analyse details of student teachers’ own lessons. Video data gives a more distanced viewpoint, construction of shared understandings and possibilities for detailed representations of actions. To this purpose we conducted a needs analysis for developing a new innovative video learning environment for building a video library that would allow student teachers and teacher educators (including supervisors in school and university) to reflect, widen, share and implement pedagogical practices and knowledge resources related to teaching, teacher learning and supervision. This video learning environment enables student teachers to upload short videos of critical incidents that characterise their classroom practice and interaction with pupils. Being critical, these incidents are of a special value for teacher learning. The videos can be viewed by all users of the environment or by groups specified by the owner of the video or administrators of the environment. In addition, all videos can be accompanied by tasks, comments, and materials such as video transcriptions, theoretical texts, and expert commentaries. All users of the learning environment are free to form groups of users where they can add or remove members in order to keep privacy intact. Finally, the learning environment has been developed for international use. Subtitles in different languages can be added via integrated translation tool and make the environment easy to use in multilingual collaborative study groups. This video learning environment was tested by student teachers, their supervising teachers, and university lecturers for video-guided construction of action-oriented knowledge. The results of this study show that the learning environment can be applied for student teachers’ training. It was especially important that all users found this learning environment easy to use and safe for presenting and analysing ethically sensitive material.

Keywords:

Video, action oriented knowledge, teacher education.