Showcase: A Westerville Teacher Shares How She Uses Video Design

Our Westerville community has an abundance of creative, driven, and passionate teachers committed to engaging students and helping them grow as modern learners. We want to showcase the incredible work we see every day! In the attempt to do just this, each month we are going to showcase at least one impactful activity going on in our district. Introducing our first teacher...

Lori Searfoss, ESL Teacher at Blendon Middle School

Lori is continually seeking out ways to engage her ESL students in activities that boost their self-esteem while also helping them develop the four language skills of reading, writing, listening, and speaking. Recently, Lori decided to have her students create videos that incorporate their writing, reading and speaking skills. Her students used WeVideo, a user-friendly video creation and editing tool, to record themselves first reading from posters in their school and ultimately from their own work. In addition to practicing forming sentences,  reading and speaking in an engaging way, and learning how to operate a tool that they can use in the future, this activity got the students looking more closely at the decorations in their school, which also sparked conversation about why different posters exist and what the messages on the posters mean to different individuals in the building.  

Lori took her students through concrete steps to create the work they ultimately recorded. Listen as she takes you through the preliminary steps to help students create the content they ultimately used in their videos:

Below is an example of a student using WeVideo to practice reading signs in their classroom. The choice to not include music in the video allowed for the student's voice to shine. Allowing the students to choose the posters they read led to discussions about the content of the posters, reasons for the placement of the posters, and meanings of the posters to different students.

The following clip is an example of a student working on her reading and speaking skills by reading some of what she created during the preliminary activity discussed in Lori's video:

Video design is an engaging activity that can be incorporated into any aspect of a lesson or unit. Interested in designing lessons or projects for your students using video design? Contact your Ed Tech Coach!