Making TCI Videos

I have had so much fun making i+1 (at my students level with just 1-2 unfamiliar words) videos for my students. I was inspired to do this after watching Bu Anne’s videos on her YouTube channel Indonesian Fun For Juniors. Most of my videos on my YouTube channel were created pre-TCI and the language used is either English or incomprehensible (for my students) Indonesian. The final catalyst that resulted in me creating TCI videos was my 2017 trip to Agen when I backed myself into a corner by telling my TRT (substitute) that I would be posting videos for students to watch and Listen & Draw while I was away.

Before I left Australia, I asked a couple of classes what they’d like me to include in my videos and that really helped me include topics of student interest. Student requests ranged from pigeons to the Eiffel Tower! Taking the video was the easy part surprisingly; the most time consuming and challenging aspect is the narration.  Sometimes I really needed a word yet to be acquired by students, so I added it as a subtitle with its English translation.

I’ve since returned to Australia and have had fun exploring how to make videos from PowerPoints which are considerably easier to narrate but harder to locate appropriate visuals. My latest idea (which I will work on soon) is to use student illustrations instead, however this can only be done towards the end of a story. Then the next challenge will be to take a ‘leaf’ (cut?) from Alice Ayel’s YouTube videos and draw the pictures myself! For some reason, this is extremely challenging for me because I am the world’s worst drawer. In Indonesia, on our way home from the 2017 Agen conference, Annie & I spent a day with Ibu Mia at her school. In one class, I drew a camel – we were talking about speed humps (polisi tidur) – and my camel picture had the entire class in puzzled laughter! I had to ask for a volunteer to draw one for me!!

My latest video is called Belle Mau Punya Teman (Belle Wants a Friend). Belle is a gorgeous pup who belongs to a colleague and the idea of creating this video came to me while I was house sitting during the last holidays. Vicki lives in such a beautiful spot and has a variety of animals that it was a no brainer to collect video on my phone while I was there. Once I had the footage, I opened iMovie and started making the project. I had no idea of the video title while videoing; that came to me when going through the footage. When I make videos this way, I don’t have a script; I simply reduce the volume of the footage and narrate straight into the project and the storyline develops as I go. Consequently, the dialogue takes a lot of editing in order to keep inbounds (using only language my students know), staying SLOW and fitting the dialogue to the footage clip. Quite a tricky balance.

Have a watch and see how it turned out: