Shafer G.

After reading the article, I liked the idea of the videos, but hated the reasoning behind them. Shafer thought it would be better for the students, in groups, to do a video discussing the literary techniques and analysis of writers and such like that versus an exam or term paper. I love the idea of the video for an end of a unit project. So each group is assigned an author you will learn about that year and at the end of the unit, or even the beginning, they play their video so that everyone knows what they'll be reading and what to look for etcetra. However, I know students hate exams and term papers, but they are there for a reason. Replacing a final essay with a video is not showing the teacher how much the student has learned. I saw this in my high school actually. Each English class is supposed to do an end of the year research essay. The higher your grade level the more difficult the paper as usual. One teacher however, since she hates reading and grading papers, changed the assignment. She let her students choose between a seven pages research essay, or a five minute presentation on their topic. A five minute presentation is completely different than a research essay. In the end, all of her students in her freshman class did horrible on their writing assignments in their sophomore year because she never made them write or taught them proper techniques and such. So I feel that have students make a video instead of an end of the year paper is not a good idea. However, I love the idea of having them do it at the end of each unit almost as a refresher of what they learned for the whole class to see.