Innovative use of collaborative video annotation system in physics teacher education
Presentation by: Marina Milner-Bolotin
Session C | 10:25 – 10:45 | Room 203
Abstract:
At UBC, we educate 8-14 physics teachers annually. Most of them have B.Sc. degrees, while some are completing it concurrently. As part of their secondary teacher education program, they participate in a 3-credit physics methods course. Its goal is to help teacher-candidates acquire pedagogical content knowledge and practice its implementation during 10-15 minute long mini-lessons. This practice is especially important, as in order to complete the program, teacher-candidates have to successfully complete a school-based long practicum where they teach real students (under teacher’s supervision). To achieve this goal, we started using Collaborative Learning Annotation System (CLAS) (http://ets.educ.ubc.ca/clas/) developed by our UBC colleagues and available to the students for free. This system allows students (future physics teachers in our case) to upload videos of their mini-lessons and collaboratively comment and reflect on them. As a result every teacher-candidate received multiple feedback about their lessons from their peers, course Teacher Assistant, and from the course instructor. During the course every teacher-candidate produced at least 4 video-taped mini lessons and uploaded them into the CLAS. Then all of us commented on each one of the videos specifically emphasizing their strengths and suggesting areas for improvement. Then teacher-candidates were asked to incorporate relevant suggestions and reteach the lesson. From teacher-candidates’ feedback and our observations, we found CLAS to be very useful for preparing future teachers. It is especially valuable considering English is not the first language for many of our teacher-candidates. We hope that other educators will consider incorporating CLAS in their courses.
