Job Discussion Forums

[naturegirl321]

I don't know if any of you had to do this before, but I did one last night. My 12 minutes were 1.3 GB and the email limit is 25 MB. Here's what I did. HOpe this helps someone

Doing a Video Demo Lesson
If you live far from the school, you might be asked to do a video demo lesson. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind. Often you can do this alone, without students, in your classroom or even at your kitchen table. The interviewer isn't going to be paying attention to your students, but to you and how you teach. Actually, I would encourage you to do it without your students and either use friends or simply do it by yourself. If you videotape students your supervisor will probably want to know why and you will have to let them know that you are looking for another job.
● Read the tips above for teaching at their school.
● If you're going to videotape your current class, get permission from your supervisor.
● Let students know that you will be videotaping during class. You'll find that they'll be on their best behaviour.
● Make sure the video is set up so that you are always in the frame. If you're going to be walking from one side of the room to the other (for example, when writing on the board) you want to make sure that you are always visable.
● Do a test. Make sure that it is easy to hear and see you.
● Check the quality when you record. If you record on high quality, you might create a huge file that you have trouble emailing. You might want to lower the quality a bit.
● Compress it. See below.

Compressing videos to 25 MB or less so you can email them
25 MB is the limit for emailing things. When I did a 12 minute video it was 1.3 GB. Yikes! Prepare to spend 20-45 minutes compressing depending on the size. Steps are below.
● Plug your camera into the USB drive in your computer. A little window should pop up. Click on "Camera Assistance" or something similar depending on your camera. Do NOT just go to My Computer and open your camera. It will not work. Trust me, I spent about an hour figuring this out.
● Then upload from your camera to your computer. (This took about 10 minutes). Find out where the video has been saved. For me it was in My Videos of My Documents.
● Then open Windows Movie Maker. Click Import Video (it's on the left side and in blue), this took about 5 minutes. Then drag the video down to the first white square on the bottom. You might be able to save your video at this point. Check and see how big the file is. At this point, my 1.3 GB had become 78 MB, which was good, but I had to compress it even further.
● Go to File, Save Movie Archive. You will have to name the video and then say where you want to save it. Then you will have three choices: 1. Save using the highest quality. 2. Save and compress. 3. Save for a specific route, such as broadband. (If your file is already less than 25 MB, simply save it using number 1, the highest quality. Then you can skip the next step and email it. If it's larger than 25 MB, you will have to follow the next step.).
● Pick the second one and click the down arrow until it gets to 20MB. (If your file is already small, you could go lower than 20.) This took me about 10 minutes.
● Ta-da! Now you're finished. My 1.3 GB was now 19 MB and ready to be emailed. I emailed from gmail, since it's faster than Yahoo. Took about another 15 minutes to upload to gmail.

[spiral78]

If you live far from the school, you might be asked to do a video demo lesson. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind. Often you can do this alone, without students, in your classroom or even at your kitchen table. The interviewer isn't going to be paying attention to your students, but to you and how you teach. Actually, I would encourage you to do it without your students and either use friends or simply do it by yourself. If you videotape students your supervisor will probably want to know why and you will have to let them know that you are looking for another job.

This wouldn't work in my teaching contexts.

First, teachers are expected NOT to be the focus of any lesson. Teacher talking time should be kept to a minimum necessary to support whatever it is the students are meant to be aiming to do.
Second, even when the teacher is (briefly) explaining a task or pedagogical point, I would want to see how the students respond, and what the interaction is, between teacher and students.

There are some vast differences in teacher-centred learning contexts (as are preferred in most of Asia, I hear), and the much more learner-centred classrooms of Europe or much of N. America.

So, I'd say this advice is very specific to regions/job types.

[johnslat]

Dear naturegirl321,

Fantastic post - thank you so much for such a lucid, detailed explanation.
I'll be trying it out very soon, and I'm sure you've saved me a lot of time and frustration.

Regards,
John

[naturegirl321]

[spiral78]

I tape lessons all the time for a whole range of reasons. Noboby thinks it's because I'm leaving

[naturegirl321]

But your kids are overage right? Most of mine, well, all but one are underage and their parents are diplomats. I don't think I could do it.

[spiral78]

Kids? I guess. The youngest is maybe 19/20, but most are in their mid-20s up to late 20s. Many of our students are adults/post grad students/professionals.

Their parents aren't a factor in any way.

Anyway, for people creating a demo lesson for a teacher-fronted context focusing on teaching children, I think your advice is spot-on.

[naturegirl321]

Actually it's a demo lesson for a uni, but I currently teach kids.

[spiral78]

Then I would recommend making sure you tape some student interaction, and include some footage of students reacting to and relating to you and your lesson. Just a moving picture of the teacher won't probably cut it....
ideally, you'd also have some student 'product' as well...a practice presentation intro of 2-3 minutes, for example.

[Justin Trullinger]

I've never been asked for demo video, but I video myself frequently for teacher training purposes.

It's not always a great view, but I just put a tripod at the back of the classroom. (Bought a special high tripod, ceiling high and looking down. It isn't really well focused, but shows the whole classroom clearly enough to see what's going on.)

If you can't video your students, could you borrow some, or volunteer to teach a class somewhere you can?

I don't use videos in hiring, but if I did, I'd really be interested in how teachers stimulate, organise, and react to student interactions, as well as how the interact with students.

There are too many essentials that you just can't show in a staged video by yourself. (pair and groupwork, clarity of instructions, comprehension checking...I just can't see what would be clear in a video sans students.)

Best,
Justin

PS- I'm curious about the hiring circumstances, though. Hadn't heard of this before...

[naturegirl321]

I don't know about the hiring, just that it's a good place to work for. I told them that I don't have students who I can tape and they said. We don't care, just tape yourself. So I did
Honestly; I just think that they want to make sure I'm presentable and speak English well enough to teach it. I'm having probs convincing people I'm a native speaker due to my name and looks.

[spiral78]

Ok, I think that's valid - if they just want to see you. But it obviously won't tell them anything about your teaching skills. You might as well have made a presentation on some teaching topic; in fact, that would likely have been more useful.

[Chris_Crossley]

The only occasion that video is used throughout the 30-week academic year on the pre-master's programme that I have been teaching on for the past 4 1/2 years is when the students have to do their final PowerPoint presentations in support of their Research Methods module dissertation as part of their final academic assessment.

Needless to say, those involved in this are actually spared from having to watch the results (heaven forbid!) because they are sent off to England, where the people responsible for deciding the students' final grades - and, hence, whether they can come to England to pursue master's degree programmes - are the ones who have to watch performances from those who stand in front of the screen, who keep walking in front of it and back again to their original position, who just read from pre-prepared notes, whose slides contain the whole text of their presentation and they just turn their backs on their audience and read from it, etc, etc.

Thank goodness it's just one day a year when we have to go through all this!

[spiral78]

Wow. All the problems you describe, Chris, are the ones we teach students to avoid in their first year of uni, here!

I can't imagine anyone applying for post grad studies still doing any of the things you describe....

[Nabby Adams]

Chris, very interested to know how many of the students get accepted to the UK. I presume that they are going as fee paying foreign students and I'd love to know if my hunch is right that the UK universities will lower their standards to almost comic levels just to get their hands on that filthy lucre.