8.3 Video & Flash

Using video
Video can be a great way to demonstrate concepts which may be difficult to explain verbally or on the whiteboard. Or just to give students another point of view.

You could create your own videos, as we saw earlier in the course, using MovieMaker, Wink or other video editing software, but this may be time consuming. So an alternative is to use video that someone else has already taken the time and trouble to create. I'm sure you're already had some experience of the huge variety of videos on YouTube. Leaving aside the talking cats, music videos and children falling over, there are a huge number of clips relevant to your subject area. Outside YouTube there are many other video sites containing great, free and open source instructional videos, video lectures and much more.

Whether you create your own video or use an existing one, you'll need to decide whether to link to the existing video or upload the original file to your course and you'll need to make sure the video is in a format your students can easily use (as we saw with audio files). The rest of this section describes the pros and cons of different approaches and the some of the various video formats available.