Lights. Camera. Learning!

Alan Levine, MCLI

Television and movies are significant in modern American culture. Maricopa students have grown up in a time of intense media saturation. Does video also have a place in teaching and learning? In this article we meet some faculty who, supported by Learning Grants, have found ways to creatively and effectively incorporate video in their classes.

Kirsten Berdahl and Peter Zawicki, GateWay Community College

Shooting Our Own Videos to Reinforce Hands-On Techniques in Physical Therapy
Peter Zawicki and Kirsten Berdahl, Gateway Community College

Alan: Can you tell us a little about your background?

Kirsten: I've been a faculty member in the Physical Therapist Assistant (PTA) Program at GateWay since 1994. Before that, I worked 11 years in physical therapy and still do some work on the weekends to keep my experience current.

Peter: I started at GateWay in 1993 as the program director and developed the program. Since 1981, I have worked in physical therapy, mainly in hospital environments. Like Kirsten, I still do some part-time work. Both of us feel that it is important to bring home to students the idea that we not only teach the concepts but still practice them. It validates who we are as clinicians and, since we practice in the field, we can continue to bring in practical examples for our students.

Alan: Tell us about the Physical Therapist Assistant program.

Kirsten: It is a two-year Associates degree program. Students complete three clinical internships in hospitals and rehab centers working directly with a physical therapist, or a PTA, and they start working with patients at that time. This year we are starting to see some of our early graduates become our clinical instructors.

Alan: Where did the idea for your physical therapy video project come from?

Peter: We had been talking about situations where students missed a lab section and how we could help them catch up. The labs are very hands-on. We also have students who need additional help. It seemed that we were spending a lot of extra time helping students review skills.

Those were all factors that went into an idea for a tool students could use without an instructor, to learn, practice, and hopefully improve their skills. We were unaware of any commercially available products that do this, and if they existed, they were expensive, and not necessarily designed the way we teach.

Alan: How would you describe one of your videos?

Kirsten: We took a particular technique, and usually fairly casually reviewed the principles at the start of the tape and then demonstrated it. One of us acted as the instructor and the other one was the videographer. We also hired a student to act as a patient. We have finished about 30-35 tapes.

Alan: How did you plan your videos?

Kirsten: Since it was like re-teaching, we found that we did not need to script it, but if there were specific points to get across, I wrote them on the whiteboard behind the camera. We've been teaching for years, so the content is very familiar.

Peter: Part of the benefit of us doing this together was that, although we teach different courses, sometimes Kirsten would stop the camera and say, "Did you want to include this?" or "Maybe you want to show it that way." It certainly added to what I did because I had a professional colleague who was the videographer who could say to me, "Here is something else you may want to include."

Kirsten: It was also valuable getting to see each other teach, so now if something comes up in my lab, I can say, "Remember when Peter taught you this?"

Alan: Did you have any experience in shooting video?

Kirsten: We already tape students as they do a practical test so the students can review themselves. We are used to the camera, but we had not been concerned about lighting and camera angles and backgrounds. It was a huge learning experience for us.

Peter: We are very pleased with our results. It took a fair amount of time. The grant process really supported us by funding and paying for the tapes and the student time. But what's more it gave us an impetus to take this idea we had floating around that we thought we did not have enough time to do and get it done. Being accountable to the grant made us motivated to find the time and finish the project.

Alan: Would you recommend this approach to your colleagues?

Peter: Definitely, especially for any type of program where students have to do repetitive demonstrations of certain skills. It is not a substitute for what the student needs to do hands-on. They have to do it themselves, repeat it with student subjects, and again in the clinical experience. But certainly it could help them focus on what they are doing with their hands and their technique.

Alan: It was interesting to hear both you and Kirsten say how much you learned from each other as teachers.

Peter: That was something we did not even plan for but was a significant benefit to both of us. Not only did we learn from each other, but we gained more respect for how we teach. Initially we thought of getting someone from outside to shoot the video, but for the length of time and knowing the importance of positioning, we felt like we could do it just as well.

Scott Adamson, Chandler-Gilbert Community College

Solving Math Problems with TV Themes and Video Scenarios
Scott Adamson, Chandler-Gilbert Community College

Alan: Tell us a bit about yourself.

Scott: Ever since I was a senior in high school, I wanted to be a math teacher. I earned a degree in Math Education at Northern Arizona University. I've taught math in Payson and Chandler high schools before coming to Chandler-Gilbert Community College (CGCC). During my whole career I have searched for ways to get people interested in and motivated to do the math.

Alan: What was it that got you started using video to teach math concepts?

Scott: When I was teaching high school, I got an idea after I saw a problem in a math book about determining the time of death of a murder victim. Since math can be a bit boring, I wanted to re-create the scene in my classroom. I decided to "stage" the murder, and I asked myself who would be the best person to murder? The math teacher! I created this character, "Cal Clueless," and worked with our TV production class on this first video.

At Chandler-Gilbert, I got the idea for my first Learning Grant, called "Rule Time," a spoof on the show "Tool Time." I am "Jim the Rule Man Baylor" and every episode is about measuring, which spins us into some mathematical concept.

The idea behind this is that students often wonder in a math class, "When in the world am I ever going to need this junk?" The video gives them a context so they can see how math can be used. They watch the video, which poses a problem that the students then work to solve. Afterward you go back to the video to see the resolution.

Alan: What math concepts are covered in "Rule Time?"

Scott: The main concepts in "Salute to Speed" are linear functions, understanding of slope, scatter plots, regression, and a little statistics. "Salute to Brakes" is a braking distance problem, which turns out to be a quadratic equation. "Salute to Sports" deals with exponential growth. And "Salute to Flight," our current project, uses some trigonometry and vectors to map out a flight plan, as well as some quadratics to solve problems with falling objects coming out of the plane.

Alan: How do students respond to this approach?

Scott: They just love it! Calculus starts with a review, and I use one of these videos which is math they should already know. So these students come in, they do not know me yet, and I pop in one of these videos. And they react like, "I can't believe this is a math class!" It is not one of those classes where the teacher is just writing on the board all day and the students are madly scribbling notes. When you walk into my classroom, my students are working together, they are talking about the problem, and the video scenarios truly help motivate them.

At the end of every unit we have a test, and the students have to write me an email message as a reflection on their learning. In a section called "highlights," I ask them to describe what worked for them, and I always hear how great the videos were. They change students' views toward math.

One of my strongest beliefs is that learning math has to be fun. If students are having fun, they might be a little more willing to wade through some of the more difficult parts of the problem solving. And students do connect the problem to the scenario of the video. Although the stories are contrived, students develop a real desire to solve the problem they see on the video. They will take the time to figure it out.

Alan: Can you tell us a bit about your newest video?

Scott: This video is about Newton's law of cooling and how it affects the time of death. We also look at exponential growth in Biology. The problem involves determining if the cause of death is E. coli poisoning or anthrax, since there is some mysterious white powder encountered. The third part deals with modeling the exponential spread of a rumor.

Alan: It looks like some an over-the-top TV news show…

Scott: Well the story is that a teacher dies, but we do not know how. We wondered how we could present the clues and the facts, so a news show seemed natural. We spoofed a bit of Nightline, where have a cynical anchor and then we cut to these silly reporters.

Alan: Your first SyRIS project was not a video product, but it did have a TV theme…

Scott: We call them "writing projects." There is not a job in the real world where you work on problems presented like a text book, "do these problems 1 through 33, and turn in the paper…" If you think about who does math, engineers are the first people that come to mind. But they do more writing than actual math calculations! So we felt it was important to have that writing experience.

Students get a letter addressed to them from TV and movie characters like Gilligan, Alice from "Brady Bunch", Scooby Doo, James Bond, etc. I think we now have 35 different ones. The letters are written to the students addressing them as the "math expert"-- students then analyze the situation and solve the problem. Then they have to write a letter back to the character explaining their solutions. I did not want the students to communicate back to me, the math teacher. I wanted the audience to be someone who does not know math. The explanations would have to be clear, concise, and understandable for someone like James Bond or Gilligan. It is still in a classroom setting, but having that character in the middle gives the student an audience to write to that is different from their math teacher.

Another possible concern is how people might look at the seriousness of the level of math in say a Calculus III class, but there we are talking about Scooby Doo, Oscar the Grouch, and Mario. People might say, "Are you teaching Calc II or fourth grade?" I wondered if that would be a problem, that the students would feel I was treating them like children. So I asked them. And they said, "no way! We are still doing the hard math and it is fun."

Alan: So what does Scooby Doo do in Calc III?

Scott: This was based on a real event I found in a news article on the web. As a gag, some students got a VW Bug and dangled it with rope from the Golden Gate Bridge. The article had all the data and details of the situation. So in the problem, the Scooby Doo gang is driving across the bridge and they see this. The authorities ask the gang if there is any danger by hanging the car off the bridge- would the vector forces on the bridge create a problem, perhaps cause it to collapse. Or not. So the students have to use their Calculus skills to analyze the whole system.

Alan: Tell us about the whole process from idea to final tape.

Scott: We started with our SyRIS team. At first it was difficult because we were trying to connect Biology with Physics and Math in a manner that fits with a murder plot. So we spent four or five hours on the overall plan. Then we worked several hours on the storyboard. We had somewhat of a script, but we wanted it to sound natural.

The actual day of shooting took about six hours. We asked some drama students to play our characters. We gave them a general idea of what the scene needed, but were specific about the clues that were necessary to solve the problem. From there, the tape went to the media staff who did an excellent job of editing. It was shot in DV format and edited with Final Cut Pro. Then it was put into VHS tape (and ultimately will be converted to DVD).

Alan: Let's say I am a math teacher thinking this sounds great, but also like a lot of work. How can I do something like this?

Scott: We want to share our projects, and many faculty have asked for copies. If we had more people willing to write activities, we could all share them and save everyone some of the work.

What is a lot of work, and there is no getting around this, is grading the projects. English teachers do this all the time, but math teachers are used to checking off right or wrong, very quick to grade. But these activities are hard to evaluate! How do you grade when it is not just the answer you are looking at but how the student explained it? And that actually is part of my MIL (Maricopa Institute of Learning) fellowship, developing a rubric for grading these sorts of writing projects.

I always tell people, and students learn this too, but when you have to teach a subject, is when you truly start to learn it. And the writing projects get at that- students do have to solve the problem, but then they have to come up with a way to explain how they solved it and what the answers mean. And in addition to the math and the writing skills, I encourage the students to use a graph if it can support their explanation. So I want them to do it in Maple or Excel, or whatever they can use to create a computer generated graph of the situation. More and more students come in with experience in Excel, and those that don't pick it very quickly. And they need to know this. Most of my Calculus students are going to go into engineering and they are going to use Excel almost every day, so I want them to have that experience in my class. I require it!

And there it is, a connection between Math and writing and communication to computer applications, all tied together in the context of solving these problems.

Video Examples
In Scott Adamson lastest video project, "eTV News Action Pi" reporter Blitz Wolfer (played by Instructional Technologist Tom Foster) interviews students Cam S. Tree (played by student Ann Posiviata) and Al G. Braic (played by student Steve Rhoton) about the recent mysterious death of their math teacher, Al Gorhythm	Randy Sample (played by student Mike Gilbert) describes some of the odd happenings and missing items from the chemistry lab at "PowerVille Community College"
Sample video clip view streaming QuickTime video	Sample video clip view streaming QuickTime video