How Students Use Handheld Video Cameras on Field Trips

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: Advanced Technologies for Learning Poster Session

Abstract

Field trips appear to have the capacity to offer many rich opportunities for learning, but for many reasons, fail to capitalize on them. To see how field trips work, focal students were given Flip video cameras on 15 different science field trips. They were asked to capture what they saw happening. A preliminary analysis of the video data the students generated suggests that the video cameras were used to capture the natural flow of activity from their perspective, as requested. These tools were also appropriated in unexpected ways. I discuss implications for the design of field trips that support learning with video technology.

Author

• Jonathan Boxerman, University of California - Berkeley