Fairmont State’s Teachers Changed From Mailing CDs to Online, Video-Powered Learning

At last fall’s TED CEC conference in Lexington, Kentucky, professors Gwen Jones and Julie Reneau of Fairmont State University presented about their experience adopting video in Fairmont State’s Teacher Education program.

“We’re excited to share. Because we’ve been on this journey,” Gwen said. “And we’re just so excited to have found something that works so well for us.”

According to Gwen, their journey goes like this:

“We started with students’ CDs being mailed in from afar, just kind of trying to get face time with students because we weren’t able to otherwise.”

Candidates in Fairmont State’s Teacher Education Program intern in classrooms located across the state of West Virginia.

“So that’s where we started,” Gwen continued. “Then we tried a different video platform. But we ended up having to provide a lot of our own tech support, which wasn’t good. And then we landed on YouTube, with which we ran into all sorts of concerns about privacy. This was all frustrating.”

It was at this time, however, that Gwen found Edthena.

“When we started with Edthena, we were skeptical. The whole school was like, ‘no, that’s not going to work.’ But, we’ve had very very few problems. And all the students have been successful.”

Gwen and Julie now use Edthena in courses across the teacher education program, outside of just field experiences.

“The quality of the video has been absolutely fabulous,” Gwen said. “No matter where our teachers are.”

“So we’ve gone from having teachers submit videos where we had no ability to comment and we were just voyeurs, just looking at it, to this really dynamic, rich platform where so much is possible,” she said. “We can create communities of practice, with possibilities for evaluation in CEC, possibilities for really rich assessment based on what we see them doing in their own assessment of their own practice. We are very excited.”