Using Videos to Boost Engagement.

On Youtube you can probably find a video that will link in with your lesson no matter what it is. These can be really effective teaching tools or a time filler. If needed you can use a “safe” version of youtube (Safetube) to remove the links, comments, and buttons that do quite often link to less appropriate content.

Whilst some of your class may sit and take in the information I doubt all will be focused. I want to share something that works really well for all my class some of whom are PECS users – they even asked to do the activity again. This was based on an idea from our speech therapist that we adapted. The idea is that we can emphasize important points and gauge whether the student is engaged rather than just appearing to pay attention. This activity is more structured than asking questions. All my class have receptive or expressive language impairments.

We chose this video as it fits in with our transport topic, is less than 5 minutes, bright, clear and the presenter is enthusiastic.

You can download the resource free here!

So what we do is to take screenshots of anything interesting or that we might want to talk about. Some should be really obvious others harder to pick up. These are all the screenshots we used you can reduce the amount for some students (4 to a page maybe). I would print the page for some so they match the images. For others they cross off or cover with a square of paper. You can also just use it as a memory jogger or put a text box under to write a fact.

And another one…

Here is the Jubilee Line version

Tube Station Bingo.

As we will be looking at the tube for a couple of weeks and revisiting later in the term I made a simple tube station bingo. It’s slides 3 onward in this file. The station that says Stone Bay is editable add your school name or local station to generate discussion “1 of these is not a tube station, can you guess which one?” or just delete it and replace. This was quite challenging for some as the colours and shapes are similar. The bigger images can be flashcards.