Making Video, But No Faces Allowed

I posted a few weeks ago about the action research project I am doing in my classroom involving video.  To briefly recap, I want the students to be able (without too much teacher support) to capture their learning using video and post it on their blogs.  Simple enough in principle, but a bit more complicated when the students are six.  (I’ll talk more about that in another post.)

There is an added challenge to this process.  The policy I have for my online work is that only students’  first names are used, and that we do not match an image of that student to their name.  This means that no images of a student can be posted on their personal blog–only on mine.  One of the things I have been grappling with is how to best post video of the children’s learning without showing their faces.

We have so far come up with three different ways (be forewarned that students did the filming on these videos):

1.  Video of  the students, but not their faces, as in this puppet show video we made.

2.  Video of an artifact (in this case a poster) that the child has made with the child explaining the artifact.

3. Video of the child explaining their learning using a Common Craft type of video.

Interestingly, when we made this last video, I saw by their videos that there were several children who clearly did not yet understand the concept of needs and wants (what the video was to have explained).  I took these children aside.  Instead of re-teaching, I showed them a few of the videos that their friends had created.  The lights came on!  The words of their peers helped them understand more clearly than all of the activities we had previously done.  Each of them was then able to successfully create a new video to show that they clearly understood the concept.

I love the way these videos allowed us to capture a moment in the children’s learning.  I’m still on the lookout for more ways that we can use video without revealing the child’s identity.  Ideas anyone?