Regarding Digital Video:
The first link is from a post made in 2008 by a teacher in the UK.

http://www.schoolhistory.co.uk/forum/index.php?showtopic=3704


The second link is from an article in JSTOR "OutHistory.org: An Experiment in LGBTQ Community History-Making" which appeared in The Public Historian in 2010.

http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.lib.uh.edu/stable/pdfplus/10.1525/tph.2010.32.4.96.pdf?acceptTC=true

My 2 Cents:
When I was in high school, I HATED history. It was so boring! Presented in the oft-used manner of a teacher either reading from outdated yellowed notes, or as some kind of mental-marathon memorization exercise, history was horrible. My first year of college was the same: facts and dates, facts and dates. Get a date wrong and miss the question completely.

The breakthrough for me came in my second year of college because I had a professor who actually liked history. One of the things she used at this time which impressed me so much was a large disc (I can't remember what these are called). It was an album sized CD-looking thing which contained photographs of historical people and places. Sometimes she played music for us based around the topic we happened to be studying. This professor made history engaging, which is exactly what the teacher in the first website is talking about.

Now, we have technologically moved so far beyond where we were when I was in school! Using digital history can bring history to life in ways previously unrealized. I think this is important at all levels, but particularly for school-aged students because what they learn in their history classes may well be the only history they ever learn. Digital history provides an interesting way for presentation and can show students that their history (non-elite) is also part of the larger picture.

This is more the theme of the JSTOR article. The LGBTQ community has embraced using digital history in order to preserve and present the history of their own community. Isn't this what public history is all about? In addition to discussing OutHistory.org, the author briefly addressed how digital history relates to public history.

"The National Council on Public History(NCPH) Web site defines public history as the practices through which 'historians and their various publics collaborate in trying to make the past useful to the public.'Digital history projects intended for a broad audience and used outside the traditional classroom fall within this definition of public history, but those that exist solely to help scholars analyze data or undergraduate students prepare for exams do not."

According to the author, "OutHistory.org falls within both
realms of public and digital history as it deploys digital technologies to make
the history of sexuality accessible to a broad public audience, aspires to make
the history of sexuality useful in the present, and engages members of the
public together with academics in the collaborative writing of that history."