274: Using Students’ Love of Youtube to our ELA Advantage

Welcome to the Thursday edition of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies. Whether you’re new to the show or a long-time listener, I’m so glad you’re here for this week’s mini episode. Today, I want to talk about Youtube, and how we can use students’ love for it to our ELA advantage.  One of my goals for this year is to create the curriculum for an elective based on Youtube. I’ve recently watched my son go through the transition from watching Disney Plus and Netflix in his chill time to watching exclusively Youtube creators. He learns magic and parkour skills from them, watches them unbox things he loves, and generally would rather be subscribing to their channels than being entertained by the billions of dollars behind the entertainment industry. He’s already made the first video for his own channel, and he was willing to work through a LOT of frustrations as he tried to figure out the problems of audio, angle, lighting, script, theme, file size, and everything else required.  I’m sure you’ve seen this same interest in Youtube in student after student.  So what does that mean for us, as educators? There’s an incredible hook here for our students. I’m thinking about a Youtube elective (or unit) that looks at so many ELA skills that matter in our students’ communication, through the lens of video. Hooks. Closings. Making an argument. Sharing research. Interviewing. Documenting. I’m imagining projects like short documentaries, time lapses, mini profiles, travel videos about your local community, PSA videos about issues kids care about, video versions of college essays or performance poems. The 21st century skills are EVERYWHERE, no matter what topics you and your students choose to dive into. I could go on and on and on, and maybe later, in another episode, I will. But for now, I just want to highly recommend that we consider Youtube an ally in our teacherly quest to help kids see just how relevant ELA is to their real life lives. You only have to look as far as the National Geographic, New York Times, and White House channels to know that Youtube plays a highly significant role in communication today.  Go Further:  Explore alllll the Episodes of The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast. Join our community, Creative High School English, on Facebook. Come hang out on Instagram. Enjoying the podcast? Please consider sharing it with a friend, snagging a screenshot to share on the ‘gram, or tapping those ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ to help others discover the show. Thank you! 

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Want to love walking into your ELA classroom each day? Excited about innovative strategies like PBL, escape rooms, hexagonal thinking, sketchnotes, one-pagers, student podcasting, genius hour, and more? Want a thriving choice reading program and a shelf full of compelling diverse texts? You're in the right place! Here you'll find interviews with top authors from the ELA field, workshops with strategies you can use in class immediately, and quick tips to ignite your English teacher creativity. Love teaching poetry? Explore blackout poems, book spine poems, I am from poems, performance poetry, lessons for contemporary poets, and more. Excited to get started with hexagonal thinking? Find out how to build your first deck of hexagons, guide your students through their first discussion, and even expand into hexagonal one-pagers. Into visual learning? Me too! Learn about sketchnotes, one-pagers, and the writing makerspace. Want to get your students podcasting? Get the top technology recs you need to make it happen, and find out what tips a podcaster would give to students starting out. Wish your students would fall for choice reading? Explore top titles and how to fund them, learn to make your library more appealing, and find out how to be a top P.R. agent for books in your classroom. In it for the interviews? Fabulous! Find out about project-based-learning, innovative school design, what really helps kids learn deeply, design thinking, how to choose diverse texts, when to scaffold sketchnotes lessons, building your first writing makerspace, cultivating writer's notebooks, getting started with genius hour, and so much more, from our wonderful guests. Here at The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, discover you're not alone as a creative English teacher. You're part of a vast community welcoming students to their next escape room, rolling out contemporary poetry and reading aloud on First Chapter Fridays, engaging kids with social media projects and real-world ELA units. As your host (hi, I'm Betsy), I'm here to help you ENJOY your days at school and feel inspired by all the creative ways to teach both contemporary works and the classics your school may be pushing. I taught ELA at the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade levels both in the United States and overseas for almost a decade, and I didn't always get support for my creativity. Now I'm here to make sure YOU get the creative support you deserve, and it brings me so much joy. Welcome to The Spark Creativity Teacher Podcast, a podcast for English teachers in search of creative teaching strategies!