Do you mind if I work on a cliché? A picture is worth a thousand words… that’s why I’d look at moving pictures today. So, you do the math, thousands times a thousand…those are a lot of words. That what you get when you work with moving pictures!
There is so much to do with video—in this video segment, I am going to show you how to make a prediction activity, meant to get students talking! This is just one of tons of different ways to get thousands of words out of moving pictures.
In order to take screenshots, there are 2 tools:
for PC users, do a search for “snipping tool” if you haven’t already found it in “accessories” and pinned it to your start menu.
for Mac users, you press three keys at one time: command – shift – 4
I am going to show you a video with quite a simple story line, but it’s a chance to get students to speculate and predict what’s going to happen without having to pre-teach too much vocabulary.
So, let’s make some screenshots from the video Soar.
What I did was download the video so that I could get the screenshots without any pause or play marks on the screen. Also, this means that I can do the activity even if I have problems with the internet on the day we look at this video in class.
So, I’ve mentioned the tools to use to take screenshots. I will do it on my Mac and show you how it works. With a PC, the process is similar.
I’ve watched the video and marked 8 different moments that I want to use for my speaking task.
Here they are if you’d like to make the activity yourself.
:37 :40 1:03 1:19 1:39 1:47 3:41 3:51
You can use any number of pics you like, but for working in pairs and small groups, I try not to do more than 8, otherwise the task might become too complicated.
So, I advance in the video and pause on the frame I’d like. On my Mac, I type command + ctrl + shift + 4 all at once, so I can paste the picture into Word right away.
If I’d like to save all 8 pictures as files, then I can press command + shift + 4. These files are saved on my computer and this is the process you use with the PC. You can save the files and then put them in your document all at one time.
After putting these all into Word and I have a worksheet like this. You can put the pics in order or have students order them. It’s a great pre-watching activity and it gets students talking.
So, get some words out of your student, maybe a thousand words, by using screenshots.
If you’d like to see this video on Facebook, click here.