A Video Competition to Promote Informal Engagement with Pedagogical Topics in a School Community

This paper presents a study developed in the scope of a larger project that aims to understand how video editing and content sharing in public displays can be used at schools to promote the informal engagement of students with curricular contents that are essential to foster future learning. The study involved a video competition where students were invited to create videos around specific pedagogical topics. These videos were subsequently presented in the public display at the school, and students could use a mobile application to rate, create comments or just bookmark the videos. Findings suggest that students are receptive to creating videos and sharing them in public displays. However, the results also show that few students that used the application to interact with the content. Many reasons for this are presented such as unawareness that the display is interactive ‘because it seems like a regular TV’, too small a number of interesting videos shown during the video contest. Particular barriers included not owning a mobile device capable of interacting, and the limitation of the large screen which does not allow searching ‘the videos we like’, as YouTube seems to do.