#8 Vimeo

What is it? What does it do?

Vimeo is a high-definition, user-generated content video site.  The image and sound quality is far superior to You Tube in terms of quality and in terms of ethics and zero-tolerance to uploading copyrighted material.  It has a much more professional feel, with incredible submissions by proper camera enthusiasts. Although it has many submissions by creative companies or adverts for online language providers, for example, it is relatively free of sponsorship and embedded advertising.

A basic, free account allows up to 500 MB of online storage and it supports HD  (720p) files, sharing with other sites and connecting to like-minded video makers.

It has a music store which contains over 45,000 tracks for you to use in your video, so there is no need to infringe other artists' work.  These are either free or very reasonably priced at $1.99.

Vimeo contains over 1,000 user-made tutorials, featuring graphic designers, film school camera-operators, lighting specialists and editors etc.  This is one of a number of Vimeo community groups, for people with similar interests or using similar recording equipment. I've just signed up myself as I already have an interest in
film making, although a lot of my previous
work involves copyrighted material! 

Anyone with an account can access the 'staff picks', track theirs and others' uploads and store favourites by themes of the user's own choosing.  I was also surprised to find that the some of the users allow their videos to be easily downloaded or played in quick-time movie format.

Vimeo contains several searchable categories to filter interest, including a super-8 film section.  Remember Steven Spielberg and JJ Abrams feature of 2011, 'Super 8'?  Well, here's an example of some arty user-generated content:

Here is a video entitled 'Scrabble'* (one of 747 with that word) made using 
'Final Cut Studio' software and featured in the group  of the same name:

(*prepare for a slight surprise at 1.26)

Here is a 'History of The Internet' - might be useful for CLIL:

There is some beautiful photography going on with this time-lapse music video
of the Milky Way and El Teide mountain in The Canary Islands: 
(18.5 million views since last April!)

A silly video which might, nevertheless, be used to launch into a lesson on writing skills:

....and there's some fantastic use of an underwater housing camera unit
going on with this slow-motion video: 

 Relevance to language learning?

'Other user-generated' video, as opposed to video generated by the learners themselves, offers second language learners an opportunity to improve their ability to understanding comprehensible input.  Videos allow teachers to ask both display and referential questions. Task-based activities which focus on fluency, learner autonomy or authentic dialogue can be based on or around video. 

Video can be valuable tools if they depict interesting, authentic scenarios.  They have a power to stimulate, provoke, entertain and engage learners into further activities which might otherwise not hold their attention.  Effective videos grab students' attention. 

Choosing a video is important, as it needs to be suitable for the context, age and level of learners.  It needs to be broken down, if necessary, into chunks of 1-2 minutes, as even a 10 minute video is too long for one consumption.  Students of any level can be easily distracted.

Although video is often popular to use with students, there still needs to be an educational purpose for it to be used in the EFL classroom.  Before deciding to implement a video-based lesson, the teacher needs to question a number of things*:

• How will the learning experience be improved?
• Who has chosen to use the video?
• What language examples are to be exploited?
• Will you pre-teach vocabulary or let this come out of the response?
• WIll you edit the video or break it down into bitesize chunks?
• How many times will the video be played?
• Does the video support any syllabus or institution's curriculum. 
• Is the technology in the classroom fir to support the format being used?
• Have you thought about what could go wrong? Anticipation of problems?
• Can the lesson still take place if, for whatever reason, the video cannot be shown?
• How will comprehension of the video be assessed?
• What is the educational purpose and how will you just the effectiveness of using it?

 

*Some of these ideas are borrowed from Christine Canning-Wilson, writing in 2000 here.

How can it be used?

Let's take the example of the 'Scrabble' video (see above), made by Daniel Ballinger.  Here is a short, straightforward monologic narrative from one side of a relationship.  It visualises inner thoughts and some of the restlessness that sometimes comes from being in a long-term relationship.  What I like about simple narratives, as opposed to over-complicated, overly-visual and meta-textual presentations is that the meaning doesn't get lost or misunderstood so easily.  What we say to a person we love and what we think can be quite different things. 

This video could be a basis for a lesson about body language, e.g. gestures and facial cues.  Teachers could explore the language involved in this, asking the students to 'read the mind' of the two characters.  The video could be show muted to begin with, and students could be paired up to guess what each one is thinking of the other.  The use of prediction tasks is widely used to stimulate interest in texts; the same can be done with video.  As highlighted above, I would break down the component parts, starting with just an image, then played without dialogue.  The student could be asked to write some dialogue for it before hearing the actual version.  A follow-up activity could involve 'writing' their own non-speaking scene, in which meaning has to come from body language.  This could be more of a writing activity, using learners exisiting vocabulary or some lexis relating to thoughts come arise out of the lesson.

Here is another video, by Ted Chung, which is also on You Tube. Students could be asked to write the story for this wordless narrative and then record themselves narrating the story back as the video plays. Great for writing/speaking practice:

When I use video I am keen to have some idea of vocabulary that might come up but I try to encourage the development of other lexis which results from the students attempts to describe what they see and hear.  Some of the videos on this site would be excellent for doing that.

What limitations are there?

There are a huge number of superbly edited but ultimately technical videos on here.  Finding an appropriate video for actual ELT might be easier said than done.  A lot of it wouldn't be suitable, relevant for using the students' L2. Some videos are fairly lengthy or show examples of bad English speaking, although still not as much as other video sites.

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Russell Stannard talks about Theory vs Practice and professional development in an interview with Richard Pinner from engnet-education.com and uploaded to Vimeo: