Smartphone and microteaching

As a science teacher educator, I’ve tried to let teacher candidates practice micro-teaching which consists of activities like recording and analyzing their teaching behavior. To do this I used to group 30 students into 5-6 teams, which meant that I needed at least 5-6 camcorders. But we didn’t have enough cams at my department, so I had to borrow them from other departments, and scheduled for every team to use them in turn.

From last year, I didn’t need to have many camcorders for micro-teaching. The solution was smart-phone which has high definition video recording system. We could get full HD videos with 1920×1080 resolution. Although I used to let my students use their feature phone a few years ago, the video quality was not so good. But the smart-phone made things different. Except that smart-phone doesn’t have a tripod, video quality is not the issue any more.

Recently, I asked my students to record their teaching behavior of introducing themselves and encouraging students to learn science within 2 minutes. I just intended to make my student see their gestures, movements, actions, and something like that. Students brought their teaching videos in their phones, and worked in group. They exchanged smart-phone with other members and watched their own and other members’ teaching video and made critiques on them.

Just like the usual reactions of my previous students, most students felt somewhat unfamiliar feeling with their appearance in video at first. A few minutes later, however, they got to find some points of improvements in their teaching behavior. This is just the beginning of our journey to be a competent teacher.

The one thing I would like to add is the power of smart-phone. I never dreamed that I could use 30 camcorders in my class. But smart-phone made this possible! This super smart machine made 30 students do their own personal micro-teaching activity at the same time.