Learning using speaking, listening, text, audio or video is creating rich and complex possibilities for expressions. As Dr. Cope notes, the search for their meaning is what is most important, and how combinations of these domains might contribute to a better understanding of what is being discussed in class or student essays.

Video is presently one of the most used such multimodal meaning concepts, and I have seen this in student classes, but also in my 6 years old teaching where educators use many short films to provide knowledge to the children that cannot yet read fluently.

In this update I want to discuss the concept of vlogging as a personal, rich possibility to use in education. Ten year ago, blogging was a new and very much used possibility for people to express their interests, experiences and professional expertise using all sorts of media – it is relatively easy to set up a blog, reference sources, introduce pictures and videos and follow each other’s writings. It allowed for a personal expression of whatever one might communicate. Later, vlogging appeared as a video format of blogging, in which one can create video updates of themselves discussing whatever affinity area was important, the big difference was that people could now see the creator of content (the vlogger), and not only read or see pictures. As a reference, in 2019 were 2.6 billion digital viewers with viewing time growing from year to year, and vlogging, driven first by YouTube in 2005 and later by performing smartphones video cameras are a big contributor to video content creation.

How about education? Could vlogging be used to provide for a more personal teaching experience? There are not many educators to use vlogging, however a few succeeded and their method became highly acclaimed. Frederick Bolzan from the International School of Boston is one of them. He asks 6-8 grade students attending his robotics class to create short videos of themselves practicing particular skills he teaches during class. The meaning, he argues, is to have students reflect in a fun way, and at the end of the semester each of them had to create a 3-5 minutes film about their robotics class. Below you can see a bit of their experiences:

https://youtu.be/OPc9QGvKnbI 

Alternatively, other teachers use YouTube to create videos of themselves as an alternative for classroom teaching, or in their words “a digital twin” that’s always there for students.

I found vlogging an interesting multimodal meaning concept, and the meaning is resulting by the way each educator uses vlogging to express themselves or engage their students.