CBL and bringing back the JOY into the classroom

**WARNING**

This post contains video of an education professional dressed in a bee costume. It may trigger memories of times when teaching seemed a bit more…fun.

Educator, artist and technology enthusiast - Diane Darrow says, “We do not need to teach creativity, but rather inspire its daily practice”.

That bee video… 

Now allow me to explain: I had fun making it and my dog loved it! But what on Earth is it (I hear you ask)?

It’s a call-to-action video I made for Challenge Based Learning - AKA CBL - for a school I’m working with. In short, CBL is incredibly engaging, encourages students to collaborate and go deep with their learning and is high in creativity and self-selected means-of-expression. Oh, and it has to relate to a real-world issue. These call-to-action videos really work and students really respond to them.

I do a lot of these and my approach to creating them is pretty simple:

1. Summarise the key learnings for the unit of study to that point.
2. Present the challenge ahead with expectations - including contributing questions.
3. Drum roll…”Our ESSENTIAL QUESTION is…”

I always write my script in Pages to take full advantage of the Presenter Mode (see video of Pages Presenter Mode in action)… 

And if there’s one thing I think is most important it’s this: if we want our students to be creative, fearless and take risks we need to MODEL that mindset (and sometimes dress up as a bee as the situation requires it).

Try Presenter Mode by downloading the Pages call-to-action script I’ve attached to this post. You’ll find Presenter Mode here:

I use two iPads to make my video - one to host my script (in Presenter Mode) and the other to film the video using the Clips app (free from the App Store if you don’t already have it). This workflow is very efficient, quick, easy and lots of fun (especially for pets).

After all, if we lose the fun, we’ll lose the students.

Attachments

Call to Action Script (Living Things & Systems) 2.pages

Download  (192.7 KB)