Resources

How literate is the average 4 year-old? If your answer is “not very”, you’d be wrong, according to Mark Reid, the Head of Education at the British Film Institute (BFI). Reid argues that many 4 year-olds already have a good understanding of how stories work: “Most children have been watching film, video and television from the age of about 1½ to 2 years old. They have a sophisticated grasp of character, narrative and genre by the time they arrive at school but no-one acknowledges it; it just gets left at the school gate.”

We live in an audio-visual age. Children are exposed from a young age to a range of technologies to which previous generations had no access: television, DVDs, iPods, Nintendo Wiis, computer games, the internet, smartphones… Though it’s not the case that all children are inherently at ease with technology, many adults will have had the experience of being baffled by how to operate a mobile phone, only to have a 6 year-old pick it up and have it working within seconds.

Yet schools are sometimes reticent to recognise the potential offered by the technologies that children are in contact with every day. The BFI is busy trying to convince schools that there are a range of audio-visual tools that can be used to complement books to help children to learn about narrative. Reid believes that, given the primacy of the audio-visual in everyday life, film should be an important part of the literacy curriculum: “What’s really needed is a definition of literacy that incorporates speech, writing, pictures and moving pictures.” If we can agree on a wider definition of what the literacy umbrella covers, including media and information literacies as well as those mentioned by Reid that would, he believes, “transform what teachers were enabled to do”.

To this end, the BFI has been working with local authorities to provide schools with packs of seven DVDs containing 55 short films, and has trained primary and secondary teachers to think about film in terms of narrative, structure, editing and sound. They have found, he says, that film can often spark a response in children who otherwise appear uninterested in literacy.

CHILDREN WHO PREVIOUSLY SAID VERY LITTLE, OR HAD POOR WRITING SKILLS, DEMONSTRATE A MUCH MORE SOPHISTICATED VOCABULARY AND WRITING ABILITY AFTER LEARNING WITH FILMS

Take one short film, ‘Baboon on the Moon’, which is used with small children. Shaheen Hashmat, a Research Consultant for ex-film producer and education champion Lord David Puttnam, explains how it helps children grasp narrative: “You just see the baboon going about his daily routine and eating his breakfast and, at the end, he takes out his trumpet and he’s serenading the earth; his eyes fill with tears and then it ends right there. The theme – separation anxiety – is something young kids can really identify with and, because it’s not a resolved problem, they can then go on to write a sequel about how the baboon can get back to those he loves. They had real problem-solving skills there.”

The BFI has found, in its work using short films in particular, that they have a big impact on children's literacy. Many teachers who have used the films have found that children who previously said very little, or had poor writing skills, demonstrate a much more sophisticated vocabulary and writing ability than they had previously shown, Reid says. He believes that because children start watching television and film very young, they have developed an ability to understand and analyse the moving image by the time they get to school: “When it’s acknowledged and built on and brought into the curriculum, it has a very positive impact. If you don’t acknowledge it, it never gets built on at all.” Indeed, a research report by Jackie Marsh of the University of Sheffield and Eve Bearne of the United Kingdom Literacy Association, entitled ‘Moving Literacy On’, says that the BFI project resulted in a measurable improvement in children’s literacy to the extent of improving SAT scores in some local authorities.

But some schools are still reserved about introducing new media materials into the classroom and so could be missing out on a huge array of resources that could not only make learning more interesting but engage learners by using technologies with which they are already familiar. By way of example, the learning consultant Professor Stephen Heppell cites a project in which he gave 13 and 14 year-old students iPod Touches (MP3 players with screens that allow you to browse the internet) and asked them to complete certain tasks. To his surprise, he found that their search engine of choice was not Google, but YouTube, because it provided them with a clear, visual set of results rather than a series of short paragraphs.

MOST TEENAGERS NOW HAVE THE ABILITY TO CREATE MOVING IMAGES AS WELL AS TO WATCH THEM

YouTube - which allows anyone to upload and share videos via the internet - and other similar sites such as TeacherTube and Teachers TV are powerful tools that are freely available to anyone and, as such, offer vast potential for the use of audio-visual materials in education. Many schools were initially cautious about these media because of the vast amount of bandwidth required to use them (some teachers and students are overcoming this problem by downloading content at home and bringing it in to use in class) but also because of concerns about the content. But that attitude is beginning to change, as schools discover that, for example, YouTube has a wealth of educational content – from science experiments (there are 47,000 in all) through to PowerPoint presentations and simple demonstrations of how to play a musical instrument. And schools can create their own content: in Castle Manor Business and Enterprise School in Haverhill, students are creating weekly videos of the school’s most interesting and important events, and putting them up on YouTube for their parents to see – a kind of digital assembly.

Furthermore, most teenagers now have, at their fingertips, the ability to create moving images as well as to watch them. And some schools are beginning to understand the value of mobile phones, which these days are sophisticated mini-computers that include a camera, a video camera, the ability to record and play sound, and a GPS function. A recent Becta report by Elizabeth Hartnell-Young, ‘How Mobile Phones Help Learning in Secondary Schools’, showed how mobile phones could be used in a variety of imaginative ways, from taking photographs of designs or experiments in Design Technology or science lessons to making a recording of the teacher reading a poem that the student could listen to later. Some primary schools have successfully used Create-A-Scape, a free learning resource from Futurelab that uses the GPS and camera functions of a handheld device such as a PDA, enabling learners to create learning journeys that are enhanced by audio-visual materials: collections of sounds and images are triggered when the user moves into a particular geographical area.

Some might fear that an emphasis on visual and auditory technologies could displace more traditional skills of reading and writing. In reality, they give teachers a wider set of tools with which to engage learners. At Longwill School in Birmingham, deaf children have been using PlayStation Portables to keep diaries in British Sign Language. They still learn to write, but the ability to present their work in their first language has added an extra richness to it.

As an alternative to essay-writing, some learners might choose to present their work by creating a series of photographs or an animated presentation using Animoto, a free web service that enables users to create short films using photographs and music. Foreign language teachers who worry about the difficulty of getting their students to talk could try YackPack, a website that enables users to upload and share audio messages, and can be used, for example, for practising speaking a foreign language with native speakers in their own country.

When modern audio-visual technologies are combined with the opportunity to use the internet to share and disseminate, we have a model that could transform learning. The internet doesn’t just give students access to a vast range of resources far beyond the reach of the classroom. It also enables them to share the outputs of their work with others. Think of the millions of students who can watch a lecture on string theory by a Harvard physicist on YouTube; or the Essex school where the podcasts created by students now have 1,000 subscribers; or the archaeology students at Leicester University who took a tour around a Kalasha village recreated in Second Life.

WHEN AUDIO-VISUAL TECHNOLOGIES ARE COMBINED WITH THE INTERNET, WE HAVE A MODEL THAT COULD TRANSFORM LEARNING

What this model does is to put the choice of how to learn in the hands of the learner, by enabling them to learn in their own time, at their own pace and in their chosen way. “Podcasts are a great example of where a fantastic resource, of an expert, such as a teacher, explaining something, can be accessed when the student needs it. It might be in revision, on a reflection of the lesson, or it might be a lesson the child hasn’t physically attended but as it’s been podcast they potentially have access to it,” says Dan Sutch, a Senior Researcher at Futurelab.

Is the future for audio-visual technologies in education therefore a bright one? Heppell sounds a note of caution, expressing concern that a “chasm” is opening up between schools that are using audio-visual technologies successfully and those that are still waiting for a national policy to be developed. But the change will be led from the bottom up, he says: “The global curriculum will appear from teachers swapping projects with each other and picking things they want to do. You can feel that change happening now.”

Links
BFI DVD packs - www.bfi.org.uk/education/teaching/primary.html and www.bfi.org.uk/education/teaching/secondary.html
YouTube - www.youtube.com
TeacherTube - www.teachertube.com
Teachers TV - www.teachers.tv
Create-A-Scape – a free resource that supports the use of PDAs – www.createascape.org.uk
YackPack - www.yackpack.com
‘How Mobile Phones Help Learning in Secondary Schools’ - emergingtechnologies.becta.org.uk/upload-dir/downloads/page_documents/research/lsri_report.pdf
Second Life - secondlife.com

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