From what I have
read, heard, and experienced, teaching students who are not paying attention or
engaged in the material is extremely ineffective. I agree with writer MarkPhillips when he wrote: “Film can
be used as a culminating experience to summarize a unit or lesson. It can be
studied as an art form. Short films designed to teach a concept or skill,
especially in a subject like physical education, can be very useful. Developing
students' critical consciousness of visual media should be a major part of every
school's curriculum and is important enough a subject to be the focus of a
forthcoming column.” Many teachers have turned to movie clips to use as
glimpses into a subject, discussion instigators, and as opportunities to teach.
So my
question is why isn’t there a place for
teachers to share ideas of movie or song clips from popular culture with
one another? What if there were a site or curated area on the web where
teachers could work together to build a crowd-sourced database of popular
culture clips to be used in the
classroom? It could be organized by subject, topic, and/or discipline, and then
meta-tagged with specific lessons (like PEMDAS in math or the signing of the
Declaration of Independence in history).
This could be an open source site, used specifically by teachers to
increase student engagement and motivation.
What do
you think? Would this be a better tool for flipped classrooms? Is there a big
enough need and passion in the teacher community to make something like this
happen?
Check out my "beta site" on the tab above - and let me know what you think.
