Top 10 Videos for 21st Century Schools

1) A Vision of Students Today - Created by an Anthropology teacher and his class from the Kansas State University. Very powerful message on how students are (learn) different than their teachers (teach).

2) A Vision of K-12 Students Today – A clip based on the previous title, using a range of students from elementary, middle and high school. Very effective when talking to K-12 educators. No excuse, that the change in the way kids learn and are communicating does not affect their school level.

3) Pay Attention – I have shown this video to fellow teachers during Pre-Planning. It set the tone for the changes we had planned technology integration wise. The video clip helped them see that we simply could not continue the way we had before.

4) Stuck on an Escalator - Commercial, but highly effective when showing teachers AND students. The video shows two people getting stuck on an escalator, too afraid of taking the next step by themselves. I have discussed the use of this clip in my classroom on a previous post “The Power of Playing ”

5) Everyone knows your Name - I have shown this video clip to 5th and 6th graders in an attempt to open up their eyes to the consequences of their online lives. The clip is a great starting point for discussion and one of the three excellent clips about Internet Safety and Cyberbullying.

6) Talent Show - This is the second of three video clips I show my elementary school students and also their parents when talking about Internet Safety and prevention of Cyberbullying. A pre-teen girl steps up on stage at a talent show and publicly harasses another girl that is sitting in the audience. The point of this video is to show how in real life kids see classmates getting bullied (not as openly as in the video on stage), but they still don’t do anything about it. It shows the need for them to stand up united against bullying.

7) Cyberbullying- In the Kitchen - The third in the series is about teenagers sitting in the kitchen with the mother in the background. The group of teenagers talk openly around the kitchen table, similar to the way they communicate via text messages and through social network places like MySpace . The way that the mother and others are witnesses to foul language and harassment might not be as obvious to the teenagers as if it is done digitally.

8) Dove "Evolution of Beauty" Commercial - This commercial is a great reminder that all of us have to be alert and learn how to be media savvy. Technology has blurred the boundaries of what looks real and what is real or not. It is part of being literate today to know how to recognize and evaluate different types of media.

9) Introducing the Book - This list would not be complete without the hilarious clip of the medieval “help desk”. It was a wonderful ice breaker during pre-planning this year, reminding everybody that “Jeder Anfang ist schwer”, which is German for “Every beginning is hard”. Learning how to read a book, how to turn pages, how to open and close it, was just as hard for someone back then as it is for some to get used to a new media today. The moral of the story is, that in a few hundred years from now, it will be extremely funny to think that there were people around who did not know how to open and close a digital document.

10) Did you know 2.0? - The updated version from June 2007 of Karl Fish’s original slideshow. What an amazing and powerful video. No further comment needed. Just sit back and watch.