Virtual Volunteering and Video


by Ann Abbott

A former University of Illinois Spanish student, Sandra Mazuera, recently made this cute video for a contest. Another student recently won a contest for his video about his time in China. Still another former student, Nancy Parman, edited videos for my Spanish in the Community class and made great videos of her own. Marcos Campillo, Spanish community service-learning (CSL) extraordinaire, just filmed and edited videos for Comunidades. My friend Joseph Squier founded a very popular University of Illinois course called Writing with Video. I just uploaded a video to Facebook of my 10-month-old treating the faucet handle like a motorcycle throttle.

It seems just about everyone is making and sharing videos these days.

So can our students give our community partners a hand with the videos they need to make? YouTube's Video Volunteers provides an organized, easy way to put video skills to use. Our students could do projects here, and it's another great example of how our former students can stay involved long after their Spanish CSL course is over.

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