4 ways to use Youtube with Moodle
Youtube and Moodle play beautifully together, meaning teachers can incorporate into their courses the best of Youtube’s educational videos to enhance and develop their students’ understanding. Making sure you use reputable channels and check out the video content first, here are four ways to use Youtube and Moodle in teaching about major historical events:
Flipped Learning
With the Youtube videos repository you can easily search for and embed a video on your current topic of study and require students to watch it prior to a face-to-face class. This put the onus on them to take control of their learning and be prepared in advance so they can discuss confidently the issues raised.
Check understanding with a quiz and video
Simply watching a video without any focus won’t always give the best results. Combine short clips with quiz questions to ensure students concentrate on key aspects. Moodle allows you to specify start and end times when adding the Youtube video link, so different sections of longer movies can be used per question. Add your video to the description question type and use a variety of quiz question types so your students don’t suffer death by multiple choice. If you want to ensure they are thoroughly familiar with the content matter, use the interactive mode question behaviour.
Developing empathy
Youtube channels such as British Pathe, the largest archive of history on Youtube, offer many opportunities for developing students’ sense of empathy and social awareness. Add a Youtube clip such as Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech to an assignment and ask students to imagine they are in the crowd: how does he make them feel? What are their hopes for the future? Or set a Flipped Learning exercise where students watch the first Moon landing from NASA TV and in class role play the events from the point of view of Armstrong and Aldrin (who set foot on the moon) or Collins (who remained orbiting above).
Student-generated content
It doesn’t have to be the teacher adding Youtube to Moodle: students can make use of the media icon in the text editor to share and discuss in forum posts any useful clips they’ve found relevant to the subject. If you teach them how to set up their own channel safely, they can add related videos to their own playlists, and can even record responses to discussions on their mobiles or tablets, upload to their channel and link to a forum or assignment.
If Youtube is blocked in your establishment, you can try Vimeo by enabling the Vimeo player from Site admin>Appearance>Media embedding. And of course if all video sharing sites are blocked, chances are they will display fine at home – so that’s another sound reason to flip your classroom!
