Abstract

Digital video is a recent phenomenon in state schools in the United Kingdom. There has been an increasing move towards its use in education, mainly fuelled by the interest of a number of influential bodies and made possible partly by advances in technology and its subsequent affordability and partly by the heavy investment made in ICT in education in the last decade.

This dissertation looks at the literature surrounding digital video editing in education, where it exists, bearing in mind that the field currently remains relatively modest and is influenced primarily by the work of a small body of forward-thinking practitioners. The key themes of hardware and software, teaching and learning creativity, quality, affordances, moving image literacy and multimodality are examined in order to set the scope of the debate about the value of digital video work in schools.

A one-off extra-curricular digital video project undertaken by a group of six Year 8 pupils in an inner-London girls’ school in early 2004 is described. One of the films created affords a significant amount of qualitative evidence, which along with interview data, is analysed with reference to the literature, in order to illustrate the application of the key themes in the pupils’ work. The positive findings of this project are suggestive of relevance to a larger population, as reference to other, similar projects will demonstrate. Digital video, therefore, is confirmed as a valuable new tool for education.

In conclusion, the place of digital video editing in the ICT national curriculum is considered, and recommendations are made for the inclusion of digital video in the ICT field, both as a new aspect of ICT capability and as a possible catalyst for a change in the wider curriculum.