This may sound like a daft title for a blog post, but it is possible to easily get an export of still images taken at regular intervals from any YouTube video, to create a storyboard of that video. These can either be printed or easily saved as a PDF, and then used electronically.
I am not sure what the legal issues are regarding copyright and this technique, but assuming that this is OK legally, then this simple technique could have a few really smart educational uses.
- As someone with a sports background, my first instinct was to use this for movement analysis, but the gap between the frames is too great for this to be realistic – but this could be used in a sports setting for crude notational analysis. E.g. if watching a game of say netball – you could count how many frames is team A in possession, how many frames is team B in possession, then work out the ratio, and you have a rough gauge of possession – compare this to the final score line and see if there is a correlation?
- In a subject like marketing, you could look at the output from a companies advert, and analyse how much of the 30 seconds is spent doing different things e.g. showing the product, showing the prize, repeating a key message etc.
- In teacher training, if a trainee teacher is filmed completing a microteach – this can be uploaded to YouTube as a private video (so no-one else sees it) you can then create the storyboard of printed images, and then analyse how their time is spent – e.g. how many frames are they writing on the board (with their back turned), how many frames are the students doing something etc. This could be a very effective tool – as counting frames on a piece of paper is much quicker and easier than trying to do the same with complex timings and starting and stopping clocks etc.
- In media studies – you can analyse the different types of shot (close up, mid shot, scene setting etc.) that are used in a sequence, and what effect this has on the message being conveyed.
Although in general I often like to move away from paper, and converting a media rich resource such as a video into a less rich image, seems to be a backward step, I think the ease of this technique and the power that it brings to carry out a basic analysis of the video is superb, and would be an excellent teaching activity.
Filed under: CPD and reflective practice, e-learning, google, How do I...?, Resources, social software (web 2.0) Tagged: | College, education, FE, HE, primary, Print, School, secondary, University, video, youtube