Live Better and Teach Better with YouTube
Internet has really changed my life both personally and professionally. It has been only 5 years into the teaching profession and I feel so liberated as all my questions today has got one answer and that is Internet in general & “YouTube” in Particular.
YouTube has made me so dependent that for everything i search “YouTube”. These all begun when I first shared the video of Mr Narendra Modi’s speech in a college and asked my students to gather the data. To my surprise, everybody watched and they all were ready next day with the facts and figures. Although I have shared many articles and transcripts of the speeches many a times before but with the sharing of video, the response was 100 percent. Then I realised that the students are more interested to see a video than to read a transcript or an article. Here started an era of using YouTube in my professional life.
I started my career with the corporate giant ICICI Securities and left in a year to pursue a career in teaching economics as it has always thrilled me. I could see that due to my past experience in terms of using technology, I was having an edge over other educators . Since beginning I was a huge fan of YouTube, for anything and everything. Earlier I was using YouTube for my personal consumption only but with the overwhelming response of my students on sharing of Youtube learning resources, I started sharing more and more such resources to grab their attention & to keep them engaged.
The idea worked and I was getting recognition from my school management on having the most engaging classroom. Students even used to be connected while they were away from school, by watching videos at home. Students engrossment into studies using internet at home was also making parents sit up and take notice.
But soon I realized that I need to look beyond the videos and share media which can cater to their different needs. For example, in economics I needed to share case studies and presententations which supports the particular topic. I also belive that a learning programme has to be designed like a “sandwich” consisting of 3 layers. First the learner should have brief knowledge about the topic through an article or some news then the same topic should be discussed in the class and finally to reinforce the topic the learners should work on an assignment.
One of my friends suggested that I use the Flinnt platform which is a very structured and controlled platform to share and communicate resources with the students.
I explored the website www.flinnt.com as well as the app on the android playstore and found it really interesting. Immediately I started sharing YouTube videos and the articles, images, data, statements by economists or politicians, graphs, their examples, case studies and the different analytics. The response of the learners was amazing, they found it so interesting that they themselves started asking me to share more resources on Flinnt. I remembered one instance where students said “what Ma’am… Since last two days you haven’t uploaded anything on Flinnt”. It really gave me a kick and I realized that students have got addicted to Flinnt.
After syllabus completion I started discussing the past papers but to my surprise 60% of the past papers had already been shared and discussed as I used to give MCQs and Essay question on Flinnt after every topic. The final outcome of all these practices was an outstanding academic result.
The platform also enables me to tag and schedule the posts which not only help me in scheduling the posts in advance but they also help me and my learners in retrieving the posts whenever the need arises. I use this feature to retrieve a post and repost it to the next learning group, whereas my learners use it to retrieve all the learning resources posted in a particular chapter so that they can revise the topic during the time of the examinations.
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