Incorporation of Digital Video Cameras for Wetlands Curriculum
- Details
- Category: Reports
- Published on Thursday, 08 September 2011 23:02
- Written by Jeffrey A. Sigman
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Grant Awarded: December 2010
All awarded funds were expended to purchase cameras, and memory chips.
Grantee: Steve Bachofer
Background: Five Kodak PlaySport Digital video cameras were purchased and used in the Jan term 2011 Precious Water and Watersheds course. The selected cameras are waterproof up to three meters in depth (to minimize the chance that one slip trekking across a wetland generates approximately one hundred dollars of electronic waste) and there are floatation wrist straps so dropping a camera does not easily lead to a lost camera. The cameras have rechargeable batteries and a 2 GB memory card. The cameras were incorporated into focused team project work and student teams were allowed limited use of the cameras at selected field sites before their team project assignment.
Results:
Student team projects yielded some video and digital photos which are somewhat useful. The student team success was highly dependent on the team members’ level of proficiency. Two video projects with some editing should yield video clips providing instruction on how to use some specific environmental field equipment. The students were provided general instructions to operate the cameras, yet for a few student teams, they did not actually have sufficient training to obtain high quality video. More explicit feedback on video/media making in the future will yield better resulting media. The faculty member is working to incorporate more instructional rubrics to guide students as they use this tool. Hopefully, this will avoid some of the perception that the camera is just a toy.
The cameras provided reasonable images at most sites and the audio was somewhat unclear unless the location was quiet. The main difficulty was having a location to store and review the captured video for the students (plus dumping the files from the five cameras). The computer lab which was available had serious limitations (digital video files were stored either under an individual student’s account or under a faculty member’s account which therefore required direct supervision). To attempt to solve this problem the faculty member started using a wiki in Moodle this Spring and successfully posted some video captured during a Spring course visit to a field site. In this way, materials could be posted at a website that only students registered in the course could view. The limitation of this potential solution is the video is buffered slowly and appears choppy. The video and digital photos could be stored via the library’s electronic repository, but the materials need to be downloaded to view or process further. The video could be posted to more standard site such as You Tube and this may be a better solution. A few videos of water at the spillway of the SMC wetland dam are posted on You Tube and the quality is acceptable. These videos show the water flow (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poJc0nyBfdw&NR=1 & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsF481oh84U ) and turbidity. It would useful in the future to use these videos along with other water quality parameters to explain the water runoff during a storm event.
Continued Project Work:
The cameras will be used in future science courses and to make appropriate video clips to supplement the lab curriculum. Steve will use the camera again in the Wetlands January term course in 2012. In this case, students will be given considerably more instruction and critique on their video projects. The storage of video and reviewing it will be an issue to attend to this Fall.
Steve has also begun a discussion with other STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) faculty on utilizing video materials and media making projects as instructional activities for our STEM curriculum. He has made contact with KQED personnel and it is likely that a media making pedagogy workshop will be held in the Spring 2012.
In addition, the cameras are in use to record Faculty Development materials which should be posted on the College’s new website.