“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”  - Aristotle

As teachers, we know our students learn in many different ways: visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, and social. But most of us teach the way we're most comfortable—and that's not necessarily the way our students learn. It's a missed opportunity if we don't use the way that a student learns best to hook them and get them excited about learning.

As a classroom teacher, you may have heard about the recent push to incorporate more computer science and coding into students’ lives. The problem could be—as it is with most teachers I know—that you feel vastly underqualified to teach anything in that realm. Coding seems like an intimidating subject and something that requires a lot of professional learning before jumping in.

When looking at the big picture of a school system, it can be daunting to think about effective ways to incorporate change. Systems are complex by nature, and education can be a hard one to change for a variety of reasons.

In most classrooms, individualized learning is the norm, and it can be problematic for many teachers. How can a teacher possibly keep all the students learning at a level that is challenging for each of them? How can a teacher tap into students’ curiosity to keep them motivated to learn? And how can a teacher make sure that all students have access to learning all the content standards? Short videos may be the answer.

Finding the Right Videos

Online videos are one powerful solution to these challenges. Students’ learning changes when they have a connected device to help them learn. But the number of methods for learning new information is almost endless on the Internet. Who has the time to sift through them all?

We’ve put together a “go-to” list of excellent sites with short videos that teachers can use to provide content knowledge and standards-based tutorials, or to tap into the curiosity of students.

Strategies for Everyday Instruction

In the 1989 movie Back to the Future II, Marty McFly time travels (in style!) to October 21, 2015. The movie treats us to a vision of the future that includes self-tying shoes, futuristic outfits, flying cars, and hovering skateboards. Of course, now that we’ve caught up to “the future,” we know that the movie got a lot of things wrong. But there are a few things that are actually pretty close to reality: e.g., Lexus apparently has made a prototype hoverboard . . . and how about those Cubs?! While no scene in the movie features a classroom, I wonder what the screenwriters would have done with such a scene.