Dr. Trent Tucker, a professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, creates two-minute news shorts for his students. The series, titled “Business News This Week,” reinforces Dr. Tucker’s class theme, #thinkbiz, which asks students to consider the business implications of everything they do in their day-to-day lives.
“I can create a 2-minute video from scratch — writing the news story, setting up the video gear and recording it, getting and resizing all of the graphic assets, and putting it together in about an hour,” he says.
By giving students quick snapshots of weekly news highlights and the business lessons behind them, he is able to easily refer back to the story when the class comes upon a related topic. Additionally, the two-minute time frame is ideal for retaining students’ attention while allowing them to process information from class that preceded the video.
Dr. Tucker cites the chroma-key feature as the tool that has proven most helpful in organizing his workflow for the shorts.
“I have a stack of images that will come in from the left and take over the spinning globe,” he says. “I take my template, duplicate it, then pop in my images which I have already set-up to a specific size, update my XML news feed file and chromakey the video clip of me reading the news and badda-boom badda-bing — instant news cast!”
We love how Dr. Tucker uses live-broadcasting to generate student engagement in his classroom! It’s proof that providing students with varying educational media can stimulate the learning process in unconventional ways!
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