Module 2 Unit 1 Activity 2: Laws and Policies that Affect Teaching

Grade: 4.0

Activity Requirements

  • Video (5 minutes) on one national law that affects teachers and teaching

Here is my submission on the legal status of teaching English at kindergartens in Taiwan (spoiler: it is illegal but ubiquitous despite this - and yes, the law is enforced occasionally). There is a lot to unpack on this topic and there were plenty of tangents I could have gone on, but I tried to keep it to 5 minutes.

I know that 5 minutes is the target length, but is there a maximum/minimum length for these videos?

Video: The Legal Status of Teaching Kindergarten in Taiwan

For anyone interested in how I made it and the advantages and disadvantages of my approach:

I used almost exclusively free open source software. It is software made by online communities of coders for the betterment of society.

I created the background art and character art from scratch in Inkscape, a vector art program. I love Inkscape, no downsides.

I used LibreOffice Impress for the compositioning and slides. It was convenient and accessible but there was an unexpected downside to this, there was a max resolution that I could export the slides to. I think this was the weak link in my workflow for this particular video, though I have some ideas for workarounds ultimately this software is not designed for exporting to video or high definition images.

I used Audacity for recording the audio.

I used Blender's VSE for the video editing.

I also used a portable version of Foxit reader (not open source but free, also portable apps are less prone to malware and bloatware) to highlight research articles and Super Simple Highlighter (also not open source) to highlight websites.

In future I may consider making a game with the content and then recording it. This would allow for more artistic control, higher quality video, interactivity and lots of animation but there are two problems associated with this approach: it introduces lag and audio video sync issues, and it requires a significant amount of coding.

I could not cover everything I would have liked to in 5 minutes, but I hope you enjoyed it!