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Volume 4 Number 2

Visual Aids for Class Handouts and Presentations - 4: Videotapes

Remember the movies that you were shown as a student? Often these were dated, worn from years of use, and ran in a projector that made noises like an old Jeep in need of a valve job. You probably don't remember much else about those movies, other than that they tended to appear when the professor was away at a meeting. With such experiences, it's no wonder that the prospect of using class time to "show movies" generates a reflex of suspicion. Yet films are good for much more than tending a class while we are away, and the availability of the videocassette recorder now gives us easy access to a wealth of inexpensive, current, and often excellent materials. Some subjects, such as the sciences, seem almost impossible to teach without graphic presentations. TCI's "Cable in the Classroom" project provides a magazine, indexed by subject, listing times and channels of several hundred hours a month of copyright-released materials that can be recorded at home and used in class.

There are two kinds of tapes for class use. One includes the "trigger tapes," which are short (~5-minute) vignette films that usually present a role-play or case study. These contain little if any content but are used to generate thought and discussion. An example may be the portrayal of an assertive student approaching a professor just before an exam and demanding to be allowed to take the test later. (Does this sound familiar?) Obviously, the discussion is "triggered" about how to handle this case, and then into variants which might change the options and choices available. One good trigger tape can generate an hour of lively thought and discussion. In some subjects, a short clip from the evening news or C-Span could serve as a trigger tape or as a timely introduction into the day's topic.

The other kind of tape is the content tape. It may be a natural history documentary used in a geography class, a dramatization of a novel being read by a literature course, or a presentation of how the world's great cathedrals were constructed for an architecture seminar.

Like any other audio-visual aid tool, tapes can be used well or badly. Two ways to guarantee disaster are (1) not to be sure in your own mind about what you specifically want your students to learn from viewing a tape, or worse; (2) not to have studied the tape carefully yourself before you use it in class.

In using a trigger tape, make a list on an overhead transparency, in order of importance, of those specific things you want to be sure that the students consider. In a good discussion the students will likely cover most of these, and perhaps some that you haven't thought of, but regardless of whether they do or don't, use the overhead to provide a summary at the end of class. This will help insure that students don't leave your class without connecting with the aspects that you consider important.

In using a content tape, outline what you want students to learn from it in the form of a written set of reproduced questions that are arranged in the order the topics will be encountered in the film. Leave enough space between questions to record notes. Give the students time at the start of class to read through the questions before you start the tape, and give permission for any student to call "STOP!" if there is a point they miss or a question they need to consider. If your classroom VCR has a remote control, give the control to a student along with the permission to call "STOP!" Students are less shy about asking their peers to interrupt the tape. Properly used, content tapes are a great teaching and learning tool.

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