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YouTube Genre Mash-Up Lesson

Looking for a 1-hour lesson that can be used in any subject area, engages students in meaningful conversation about course topics and gives students an opportunity to develop collaboration and creativity skills? Well, look no further. Welcome to the YouTube Genre Mash-up.

If you have ever asked students to create a skit, a newscast, a song or rap to demonstrate their knowledge, you likely noted the high level of student engagement and the high level of learning that happens when students have to do this type of creative thinking. You likely noticed that students understood the content more deeply by having to apply or transfer knowledge in a new way. With the YouTube Genre Mash-up, you’re getting all that, plus you’re meeting students where they are at by using popular YouTube genres that they know and love.

YouTube is full of new genres and helping create additional ones all the time. Imagine asking students to demonstrate their knowledge of photosynthesis as an unboxing video. What about having students describe what they know about geometric shapes as a Bat Dad video? How about the “Checks and Balances” as an “Annoying Orange” video? A newscast is fun, but I suspect kids might be slightly more engaged in doing The Boston Tea Party as a “bad lip reading”.  

All you have to do as the teacher is 1. Put students into groups and 2. Assign each group a topic and a YouTube genre. The possibilities are endless, and so is the fun. If you want to spice up this strategy a bit more, here are two suggestions:

First, try adding some randomness to the mix by having the topics and genres assigned and matched up live in front of the students with a push of a button. You can download the YouTube Genre Mash-up Generator spreadsheet at YouTubeclassroom.com, which is already set up to randomly pair your topics with the genres you have chosen.

I also like to add a time constraint and have students upload to YouTube by the end of the class period. Constraints can inspire creativity, and by establishing the deadline as the end of the class time, you are helping students focus and be productive. After all, you aren’t looking for a completely polished video here; you are looking for students to be engaged in the higher-order thinking that comes with application and transfer.

Well, what are you waiting for? Download the YouTube Genre Mash-up Generator today and get your students engaged in this collaborative creative exercise. They’ll have so much fun, they won’t even realize they are learning!

About the Author: Patrick Green is the author of “50 Ways to Use YouTube in the Classroom” and “Classroom Management in the Digital Age.” He is also Chief Adventure Officer at Raising a Maker. After two decades working with and learning from students, parents, teachers, and administrators in stateside and international schools, he is living location-independent in the pursuit of extraordinary personalized learning opportunities for himself and his family. A YouTube Star Teacher, Google Certified Innovator, and Apple Distinguished Educator, you can follow how work, school, parenting, and play blend for Patrick at @pgreensoup on Twitter and Instagram and can visit his YouTube channel for more tips and tutorials.

Create a Classroom Ad Campaign

What does an ad campaign have to do with being a teacher you might ask? Let us share with you why we think you should steal some ideas from the marketing world to help set your students up for success when using technology in the classroom.

The beginning of the school year is the best time to focus on creating a learning culture so that you can get everyone off on the right foot. Teachers who spend time at the start of the year establishing procedures and expectations for common classroom tasks enjoy a more smoothly running class throughout the entire year. Well-defined classroom procedures use time efficiently and, therefore, allow more time for learning. Additionally, procedures decrease misbehavior and disruptions in class since students are less likely to be disruptive when expectations are clear.

Stating your expectations and procedures out loud doesn’t make them magically start happening in your classroom. You’ll need to not only establish and teach your procedures and expectations, but you’ll also need to spend time practicing and reinforcing them throughout the year.

One way to reinforce your expectations is to create a visual advertising campaign. Creating an ad campaign for your classroom processes, procedures, and expectations can go a long way in helping teachers to create a positive learning culture in their classrooms. Teachers can create posters to “advertise” the main classroom processes and procedures. These posters serve as visual reminders of expectations, and teachers can refer to them when correcting behavior. An expectation “ad campaign” will pay off as procedures develop into routines, and students begin to take ownership of the classroom culture while monitoring and correcting themselves and one another.

Here are some posters that we’ve used in our classrooms to reinforce our expectations while simultaneously setting a positive tone and give students clear guidelines that they can begin to take ownership of.  

(thumbnail files for posters here)

Many teachers will want to create their own to align with their specific classroom rules and procedures, but feel free to download our posters above and more at www.cmdigitalage.com  Whether you create your own campaign or start with ours, the effort will pay off as you build a classroom culture where expectations are clear, students know what to do and start to take ownership of their smooth running classroom.

Patrick Green is the author of “50 Ways to Use YouTube in the Classroom” and “Classroom Management in the Digital Age.” He is also Chief Adventure Officer at Raising a Maker. After two decades working with and learning from students, parents, teachers, and administrators in stateside and international schools, he is living location independent in the pursuit of extraordinary personalized learning opportunities for himself and his family. A YouTube Star Teacher, Google Certified Innovator, and Apple Distinguished Educator, you can follow how work, school, parenting, and play blend for Patrick at @pgreensoup on Twitter and Instagram and can visit his YouTube channel for more tips and tutorials.

Heather Dowd, EdTechTeam Program Coordinator and Dynamic Learning Project Mentor, is a teacher who helps other teachers use technology in meaningful ways for student learning. Teaching English in Japan inspired her to become a teacher and the adventure hasn’t stopped. Heather is a Google for Education Certified Innovator and Trainer, Apple Distinguished Educator, and author of “Classroom Management in the Digital Age” where she encourages teachers to set the learning free with a solid classroom management plan. She is a former physics teacher, instructional designer, and education technology coach who loves talking about physics, digital citizenship, coaching, spreadsheets, and design. She believes that students should have access to current technology in order to connect to the world and be creative in ways that weren’t possible when she was in school.

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Creating Empathy with Coding

TODAY on EduSlam we released Creating Empathy with Coding

⏯  To watch the video which was released today but will disappear on Sept 4

✅ Sign-up HERE

 

cross-posted from kevinbrookhouser.com

Many in the EdTech community have been exposed to various ways students and teachers can use Google Forms, Sites, Docs, Slides, and other platforms to create interactive branching logic “choose your own adventure” style activities. I’d like to take the conversation deeper to explore how this kind of technology can do more than create interactive narratives and how it can teach challenging science topics, how it can simplify complex math concepts, and how it can build empathy to broaden our students’ understanding of world cultures.

What is Branching Logic?

To get a sense of how branching logic works, play this simple Oregon Trail ripoff game designed using Google Slides.

Notice how you start with a choice to make and the outcome changes based on what “branch” you choose? Anyone can easily build these kinds of web experiences as long as you know that you can link any object (including a text box) to another slide in the deck. Select the object and then insert > link.

You’ll also notice that I have oriented the aspect ratio of this slide deck to be portrait instead of the traditional wide landscape. I did this to make the slide deck more mobile friendly. We normally hold our phones vertically, so this app is more of a mobile app. File > Page Setup > Custom > 9×16.

While this “app” is cute and kind of fun to make and use, its educational value is relatively limited. Sure we could add as many different complex branches to this app, but in the end, it would really be an interactive narrative. To be true, this alone is a great activity to freshen up creative writing activities and turn writing work into visual collaborative projects for students.

Go to bit.ly/codeoregon on your phone to try it!

How does this redefine education?

Well, it doesn’t really. It really just augments education with cool and useful technology. You could create this kind of experience using pencil and paper and build an interactive book that tells the users to turn to a different page based upon their choices. Hence, Choose your own Adventure Books, which I adore by the way.

Purpose Driven Education

I have dedicated my career to help teachers and students find direct meaning and purpose in education. I don’t believe school should just be a means to get a job or even build skills. It should be a tool we use to explore and define our purpose in life … a place to figure out life’s meaning. That’s why I am constantly asking my students to ask, “Why are we doing this?” “How is this work having an impact on our world?” “Who will benefit from the work we’re doing?”

The Syrian Journey

I was absolutely blown away when a colleague sent around a link to a BBC website called “The Syrian Journey.” In the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, the BBC was looking for ways to build more empathy for a population what was, frankly, not receiving a great deal of empathy in the western world. These victims of terrorists were often portrayed as terrorists simply because of their religion or ethnicity.  The Syrian Journey asks readers to assume the role of a Syrian looking for a way to help keep his or her (the user chooses the gender) family alive through a civil war. Readers are forced to confront a series of very difficult choices. Few of them are desirable, and most of them have life-or-death consequences. I couldn’t help but feel more invested in the story and identify with this population on a human level rather than a statistic or another politically charged headline.

An Immigrant’s Journey

Several fellow teachers and I were so moved by this site that we began collaborating on how we could get our students to develop a similar project using a variety of academic subjects. Our humanities students started drafting the narrative and conducting the research. Art students started working on the illustrations, Spanish students began translating the writing, and my tech students started building the framework. We decided to use Google Sites for the project, but other platforms would have worked as well.

An Immigrant’s Journey mapped out with Post-It Notes

This process was MUCH more complex than we had imagined. Keeping the story coherent required a lot of complex post-it notes and Google Doc folder structures. The project isn’t perfect, but we do have something to share with others, and we learned a great deal through the process.

Branching Logic in the Science Classroom

Using branching logic isn’t limited to creating interactive narratives. We can use branching logic to help organize and understand complex structures. Imagine you’re hiking down a trail and you notice an animal track. How would you go about identifying the source of that track without an expert zoologist at your side? Scientists categorize species of animals based on the kinds of tracks they make and by simply answering a series of questions based on observations, we can get closer to the species of that animal. Here is a prototype of an animal tracking app that could inspire your class to make more complex identifying applications with more choices and more data.

This kind of application could be used for identifying plants, insects, even diseases. Math teachers can create these kinds of projects to help students how to identify shapes or to identify what rule students could choose by applying a geometric proof. When I shared this with an anatomy teacher, she immediately saw this as a way to help students understand how dermatologists identify skin diseases. This fall her students are going to create a skin ailment app. A librarian wants to use this kind of project to create a kiosk in her library to help visitors get book recommendations. She’s going to build the site using Google Slides and display the slides using a mounted iPad. Visitors can answer questions such as what genre they’re looking for and get the latest recommendations based upon their choices.

 

Kevin Brookhouser is a Google Apps Certified Trainer and a Google Certified Teacher based in Monterey, California. He has trained a wide variety of groups and individuals to use Google and other tools to save time, increase collaboration, and enjoy technology. Seriously. He is also a high school teacher at York School and helps teachers there use technology as the Director of Technology. Fancy title for a fancy man. Kevin also serves on the board of trustees for the International School of Monterey. Kevin is the author of The 20time Project: How Educators can Launch Google’s Formula for Future-Ready Innovation and Code In Every Class: How All Educators Can Teach Programming. Kevin is optimistic about the future because he believes many of the world’s most pressing problems can be solved by current students who have access to great teachers and breakthrough technology. 

 

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How to Sketchnote

TODAY on EduSlam we release the third short video  in our two-week series: 

How to Sketchnote – Featuring Sylvia Duckworth

⏯  To watch the video which will be released today but disappear on Sept 4

✅ Sign-up HERE

benefits of Creativity and sketchnoting

What is Sketchnoting?

Sketchnoting is a form of visual-notetaking. You draw or doodle your thoughts, observations, or notes in combination with words or text. Sketchnoting is not art. It is a very personal way to document your thought process. You do not have to be an artist to sketchnote! Taking visual notes that make sense to you is what’s important; your sketchnotes don’t have to make sense to anyone else.

Why sketchnote?

Sketchnoting offers many benefits. Studies have proven that images are more effective than words when it comes to memory retention, comprehension and motivation. There are psychological benefits as well because sketchnoting has a calming effect similar to meditation and listening to soothing music. Sketchnoting also allows students to see the bigger picture in the concepts they are studying, to make connections in their learning, and to display their learning process. Every teacher I have talked to who has introduced sketchnoting to their students has claimed that the practice has positively transformed the learning environment. Students love sketchnoting and are more engaged in class when using this method. Notetaking becomes more meaningful and fun when doodles are added to text. It quickly becomes a favorite activity for many learners.

Eduslam Sketchnoting Lessons

I’m super excited to share with you 5 quick sketchnoting lessons that you can use with your students to start them sketchnoting right away. The lessons will cover:

  • How to draw people

Then, later…

  • How to draw faces
  • How to draw icons
  • How to draw fonts
  • How to draw banners

Get started by watching the first Sketchnoting EduSlam today.  Make sure that you have your drawing tools ready before you press “Play” and have fun sketchnoting!

Sylvia Duckworth
Author and Consultant
Sketchnotes for Educators
@sylviaduckworth
sylviaduckworth.com

Coming Soon:How to Sketchnote for Teachers and Students

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Provocations to Excite Learning!

TODAY on EduSlam we release our next short video in our two-week series: 

Provocations to Excite Learning with Trevor MacKenzie

⏯  To watch the video that was released today, but will disappear on Sept 4

✅ Sign-up HERE

____________

the Power of a provocation by Trevor MacKenzie

You know those moments in class when we have your students on the edge of their seats?  When engagement is palpable and their eyes are wide open? You can hear a pin drop. You can feel their excitement.  And you just know they are getting it.  They are understanding and their minds are full of wonder and interest.

I aim to create these sorts of learning experiences as much as I can in my classroom.  I believe that when students are genuinely engaged and their curiosities and wonders are afire amazing learning happens.  Not only does engagement skyrocket, but I witness higher student achievement, more grit, and perseverance in their learning,  and perhaps most importantly, a greater sense of pride and enjoyment in class: students love learning.  

Some of my most engaging, active and exciting lessons have begun with a provocation.  In the inquiry classroom provocations are questions, images, artifacts, and videos that stir thought, wonder, curiosity, and further questions in our students.  I use provocations to determine where learning can take us, what research we will need to do, and how I can best support my students in this process.

One of my favorite video provocations is this inspiring video about Karl, an Abyssinian ground hornbill at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, DC.  Karl has minimal use of the lower half of his beak due to natural wear over the years. As such he has a difficult time feeding and is limited in what he can eat and how easily he can eat it.  The good folks at the zoo decided to do something about it.  The result is not only inspiring, it’s innovative and educational. Have a look!

I love using this provocation in class as it ties so perfectly with the prompt “How can you use technology to solve a problem?”  To most students, this question is overwhelmingly open, broad and non-specific. Students feel uncertain about what they should do to address the question, where to go to find the “problem”, and what exactly their teacher is looking for.  But when this question comes after the provocation, students generate amazing ideas. Karl’s story opens their minds to how technology can solve problems; it sparks their own curiosity in authentic ways and it helps me leverage learning to do some really engaging stuff!

If I am working with younger learners I may show them a different provocation and tweak the prompt to “What could you create and invent to help solve a mundane task?”  For example have a look at this awesome GE commercial that tells the story of Molly, a highly creative and determined child who figures out some innovative ways to get out of doing her chores.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEPyefJps0Y

How fun is that?  

Think for a moment how your students would respond to Molly and Karl’s story.  Consider how these provocations tie into what you have planned this year in your classroom.  Think about where these videos could be used as start points to your lessons or units. And try one on for size for yourself!

Get started by watching the Provocations EduSlam today with

Trevor MacKenzie  - Author and Teacher

Trevor MacKenzie  – Author and Teacher
Books:The Inquiry Mindset  and Dive into Inquiry

@Trev_MacKenzie

 

 

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