Six Second Schooling – Using Vine in the Classroom

Overview

Vine is a hugely popular video creation app from Twitter that lets users build and share their own six second videos. While six seconds does not sound like much time to accomplish any meaningful learning or teaching, you may be surprised just how inventive students need to be to condense their thoughts and ideas into a six second masterpiece.

Name: Vine – vine.co
Pricing: Free
Compatibility: iOS/Android/Windows phone
Access: Email signup (ages 13+) (Vine rules)
Privacy: Customizable (privacy policy)

A Quick Look

Firstly, this is what a Vine looks like:

Create an account

To create an account you can use either an email address or your own Twitter account. Given the age restrictions (13+) on Vine, many educators opt to create a class account, rather than have students create their own.

Recording a Vine

Once an account is created, the video production process is extremely simple. Just touch and hold the screen to record, and release to stop. This can be repeated multiple times within the six second window to bring together multiple clips. 

Extra features

To help with the creative process, Vine lets you flip camera, add a grid, sharpen focus, and also toggle a ghost overlay of the last image recorded. This is particularly useful for lining up props if your students are creating a stop-motion animation.

In Practice

1. Six second book trailers

This fantastic application for Vine comes from The Daring Librarian and showcases some fantastic student creations. Encourage your students to make trailers that are not only informative about the book, but also ones that will draw inquisitive readers in. Have your students create storyboards to plan out their trailer beforehand to help with the creative process.

2. Record a method

Condensing a whole science experiment, cooking process or artistic creation into six seconds is a difficult task. Use this as the challenge for students to record their creative process using Vine. Not only will this make them think carefully about the key steps in the process, but it will also challenge them to present them in a way that is fluid and presentable. Check out this great example of making a Garden Starter.

3. The six second summary

Whether it be for an English text, a Physics concept or a historical event, deconstruction and analysis is an important skill for students to develop. Ask your students to dissect the key events in an area of study and produce a Vine to distill this into a size second clip.  Take a look at this Vine compilation of ‘Six Second Shakespeare‘ clips created by English teacher Tim Nance.

4. Stop motion animation

Stop motion can be one of the most fun and creative activities for students of any age. The simple interface on Vine and its limitation to just six seconds makes it the perfect platform to create these brilliant film shorts with your students. Check out this imaginative example.

5. Take it outside

Next field trip or perhaps over a weekend, ask your students to record their experiences by making a Vine. Given the short length of each video, the creation process does not need to be time consuming and a whole class presentation can be a quick and easily managed activity on return to the classroom. You could even combine all the Vines into a single compilation video to share with parents.

Links and Next Steps

• Getting started with Vine – Official help from Twitter
• How to Use Vine – Detailed guide from AARP
• Six second storyboard – Lesson resource from The Daring Librarian
• Vine Video Summer Book Trailers – Great examples from The Daring Librarian
• Teaching with Vine – Instructional slide deck from educator Shelly Terrell
• Using Vine In the Higher Education Classroom – Video by Justin Marquis
• 3 Ways To Use Vine In The Project-Based Learning Classroom
• Five-Minute Film Festival: Vine and Instagram Video in the Classroom
• 8 Creative Ways To Use Six Seconds On Twitter Vine

Feature image courtesy of Flickr, Arek Olek.