The Teaching Channel

On the website, Teacher Channel, there are several videos that are perfect for my specific grade level or just a good classroom teaching technique.

1. Roll the Dice: Participation Exercise

I think this is a great strategy because dice are luck. You can roll the same number three times, so the students always have to be ready instead of other common participation exercises like the popsicle stick or game cards. Once you draw one, they go in a separate pile, so they will not be repeated. This strategy gets the whole class involved and prepared to answer every question. 2. Switch the Sign Song

Anytime a song is played, the students retain information better than if someone just spoke the information. The song sang in the video is relevant to the information that my students are currently working on. I definitely think I will use this method in my teaching. These teaching methods can be transferred to different subjects and grade levels. I can see how applying these in my class would be a benefit for my students learning.

Humor

After reading this article about using humor in the classroom, I reflected on teachers I had that use funny characters, pictures, or videos to enhance learning.

My sophomore and junior year history teacher, Mr. Burdock, would break up rigorous notes with a funny youtube video. Most of the time, it would be several clips from the TV show, Wipeout, of the worst "wipeouts" they have had on the show. By showing these videos, our hand and mind got a break, we could get a good laugh, and then refocus on the next section of notes. Another way humor was used in his classrooms was during test review games. We played review basketball or history bingo almost weekly to review. He had to use humor in the questions asked and answer choices to keep us motivated and interested. In basketball, he would make up ridiculous basketball shots to attempt to get point. Everyone wanted to try in, so the whole class wanted to answer the questions correctly to get the opportunity. We were able to laugh at ourselves and other classmates as we attempted crazy shots from all areas around the room. This gave our brain a break between questions and motivated us to learn the material.

Blabberize is a neat website that I definitely can see myself using in my classroom in the future. This tool can be used for reports and presentations for explaining information or solving a math problem by verbally explaining the steps. My students would enjoys finding a funny picture or character to use, but they would complete the problem and enjoy the math because it is funny.

Below are 2 funny pictures I could use in my class to show kids how not to solve before I show them the correct way to solve for "x" and "y". These pictures should grab the attention of and engage students to learning to find "x".

Click here to watch a video that I can use in my classroom the week when they are learning to combine like terms and use the distributive property.