I've been thinking about our discipline plans: the rules, the consequences, and the rewards. I'd love to know your thinking and suggestions for videos in your content area that might actually be inspiring treasures that might serve as rewards and motivate students to learn more on their own. The real work in such a reward process is the amassing of the treasures and deciding how best to use them and evaluating their effect on the students. Under helpful links here in our blog you'll find "Teaching with TED." This is where we might start the search for meaningful, standards-aligned and content-topic related videos. These videos can begin a conversation in your classroom and send some of your students off in search of more to learn about the topic. For example, I recently watched "Arthur Benjamin Does Mathemagic" and was motivated to find out more about Vedic math calculations. When the reward is, perhaps, also the seed for learning more or building respect for the learning, then I think students begin to see that learning is its own reward. I hope you'll explore Teaching with TED and share those video clips with us that might be appropriate as a reward or for inspiration within your subject area. Image from (CBS)
To me, YouTube is a treasure trove of possible reward videos, because most everything on there is short. The other day my daughter and I were howling through "Duck Amok," and I said, "What a great way this would be to teach postmodernism." I did teach my students postmodernism last year, believe it or not. I'm going to be researching reward videos, especially ones that support reading strategies.
ReplyDeleteAnne, you'll have to elaborate on that Post-modernism lesson for me. I envision using Duck Amuck (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ce8J92AEfCs) for modeling the importance of context in writing -- how a writer can't neglect the appropriate setting to reveal time and occasion, the importance of sounds, including "dialogue" for the memoir or personal narrative, the importance of "Zooming In" to the details, like author Barry Lane describes, or the importance of action and movement, physical description (concrete sensory detail), and probably much more. What a great short video for classroom use. Thanks
ReplyDelete