Channel Four have supplemented their popular ClipBank resources for 11-16 year olds with a new digital library of 250 French, German and Spanish video clips culled from their award-winning archives. Available on DVD-Rom, the clips are arranged by relevant topic and grammar point. By purchasing a suitable licence, they can be shared across a school network and accessed simultaneously. Searching for suitable clips has been made easy with the recently launched ClipBank Utilities, a free download from the ClipBank website.
In the demonstration video, Baldev Singh Winner of National Innovation in Education 2004 praises ClipBank for encouraging:
- personalised learning
- assessment for learning
- creativity
- students and teachers to develop high level ICT skills
He also points out:
- lesson plans can be contained within ClipBank
- playlists can be created and edited according to students’ needs
- personalised documents or notes containg keywords and screenshots within playlists can be shared with pupils and other colleagues
- pupils can edit the clips to make their own resources and even record an audio narration using sound-editing software such as Audacity
- the software allows the teacher to become more of a facilitator letting the pupils take control of their own learning
There is an example of learners of German watching a video clip of German native speakers and English people trying to speak German. The pupils record their own voices and compare their audio track with the original.
Their teacher explains how ClipBank helps his pupils to:
- use their German for real purposes
- work at their own pace and to their own outcomes
This is what two of the pupils said:
“We had to record our own voices and put it over there. So it kind of sounded like we were talking even though it weren’t brilliant, it was fun. It was better than normal sit down doing work. It was using a different thing on computer we’ve never used before. So it was really good.”
“Just much better because you just take it in more. It’s just easier to understand and to watch than to write it all down”.
Praise indeed.
For more information go to the ClipBank website
Comments