Innovative Video Technologies

Why classroom video?

Research has shown that video has unique affordances that make it a valuable tool for promoting teacher learning:

Video is a unique medium that captures the complexity and richness of classroom interactions, allowing viewers to observe in-class teaching and learning as if they were physically present (Brophy, 2004)
Video provides a rich record of classroom events, allowing teachers to pause and rewind their videos to revisit speciﬁc episodes for detailed analysis (Sherin, 2004).
Video allows teachers to view and examine their practices away from the cognitive and emotional involvement they experience while teaching (Derry, 2007).
Video also provides a springboard for teachers’ collective examination of teaching and learning (Borko, Jacobs, Eiteljorg, & Pittman, 2008)

Limitations of video

“What we see is governed by how we see, and how we see has already

been determined by where we see from.” (Holquist, 2002, p. 161)

Although video offers many affordances, it also has inherent limitations:

Video is only a record that reflects a particular point of view of what occurs in a classroom (Sherin & Dyer, 2017a). This is called the ‘keyhole’ effect (Sherin & van Es, 2007).Video is not an objective medium as ‘whether the video is taken from the front or back of the room, zooms in or is wide angle, influences what can be seen in the video and the sense one gets of the classroom being observed’ (Sherin & Dyer, 2017b, p. 49).

To circumvent the limitations of video, some researchers have advocated the use of multiple cameras placed at different locations to capture multiple points of view of the same classroom to provide a complementary account of classroom processes (Clarke, Mitchell, & Bowman, 2009; Fadde & Rich, 2010).

Unique affordances of innovative video technologies

We used two types of innovative video technologies to circumvent the limitations of videos.

Wearable point-of-view (POV) cameras: POV footage allows access to first-person perspective, offering perspective coherence (Umphress & Sherin, 2014) by preserving ‘what is accessible and potentially relevant to actual participants as they construct their own trajectory of participation through an activity in a setting’ (p. 222).
Panoramic cameras: immersive panoramic footage provides a sense and feeling of presence, situatedness and embodiment. Such bodily awareness may offer teachers a more realistic and authentic sense of the class situations (Gutierrez et al., 2016).