Student 2.0 Teaches "Grammar" on YouTube
Friday, 9 February 2007 Clay Burell 
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Doug Belshaw’s blog is valuable for his “Question Time” posts asking other teachers how they do stuff with all these new tools we’re lucky enough to coincide with.
He asked a question recently that I (and I’m sure most of us) am also chasing answers to:
I want my students (11-15 year olds) to do more presentations to the rest of the class. However, how do I get away from the now-standard (and boring) model where embarrassed students stand at the front reading from an extremely badly designed Powerpoint or head-down reading a set of notes? [Doug's emphasis]
Below is something I didn’t assign (though I did encourage) as a way for students to present their lessons to their classmates on 20 stylish sentence patterns. They each designed a lesson on one pattern, including a follow-up quiz, on the class wiki. This student embedded a self-made video to present her lesson.
It’s not finished, but the student gave me permission to show it anyway. I like it for its simplicity and authenticity–and for its usefulness.
(The nice handwriting and voice don’t hurt either!)
Talk about replacing textbooks….bye-bye, grammar books (and costs). Our students teach it themselves now–on YouTube. (And couldn’t the grades below this student learn from this?)
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Tags: lessons, student 2.0, textbooks, video, web 2.0/ read-write web, wiki Print This Post
No. 1 — February 9th, 2007 at 10:27 am
Hi Clay,
You’re absolutely correct – textbooks are a bit of an anachronism now. Or at least they are in the way they have been traditionally used: worked through from beginning to end. Instead, they should be used as just one of many resources available.
However, due to their cost, I can’t see many schools in the future being able to justify purchasing textbooks that go out of date so quickly in many subjects.
As Dave Warlick (www.davidwarlick.com/2cents) says continually, classrooms are and need to become increasingly ‘flat’ with the walls of the classroom being knocked down so that learning is no longer confined within four walls. The work you’ve been doing, Clay, with your students – encouraging them to use YouTube as tool is fantastic. Keep it up!
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