Barbara was using video in her work with student teachers right from the very beginning of her time at UVM. The use of video is fairly common in early childhood education courses and Barbara and her students were using videotape. Only recently has she made the shift to digital video.
As Barbara and her colleagues began a deeper exploration into the use of documentation, inspired by a pre-school in Italy, they found that they wanted to work with the best visuals they could get. They wanted better audio to go along with the video they were capturing, too. Adam Deyo, a graduate student in early childhood education and a member of the PT3 grant team, told the instructors in the pre-school program at UVM that iMovie digital video would be superior to videotape in terms of quality. The instructors had seen some digital video in action, and knew that working with it would be better than their current video options.
Thanks to the PT3 grant, they were soon working with their new digital cameras and found that not only were they able to get a better quality image and better audio, students were also able to work with the video in new and important ways. Their ability to capture it was less cumbersome, and they were able to tell their stories much more richly because of the ease with which they could work with the new medium.
As Barbara emphasizes, it's not so much what they capture but the process that students engage in while working with what they capture. The digital video opened up new horizons regarding the process.
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