From the looks of my profile, I could not blame you if you thought all I did was sit around and watch movies and sports. But I am also a special education teacher. I used to write a lot more about my job but lately I have been focused on more fun things. Don't get me wrong, I love working with my students but there are so many other things that I have to do at work that I have been trying to distract myself from. But every once in a while, I stumble across something that just screams that I need to share it with anyone else who wants to use a bit of edutainment to teach kids.
Last week I was looking for a fun way to introduce ancient Rome to my students. Although I have used things like Brain Pop to peak their interest, that sometimes comes off as a bit immature for high school. I have also used Crash Course videos but those can be too boring and cover way too many unimportant details. I refer to that as "hitting my students with a fire hose of information".
That is why I was so excited to stumble across a YouTube Chanel called "Infonow". The specific video I found was called "The Roman Empire: The Rise and the Fall in 11 Minutes". It is a perfect mix of fun and essential information. It is a video that uses simple animations to entertain the students while a voice tells the important details of the story (after all, that is all history is... the longest story ever written).
The video also uses text in a very fun and effective way. First, the text pops up on different parts of the screen. This keeps the students' eyes darting around looking for them instead of just staring at the bottom of the screen as they wash over them. They also know how to make less equal more. Instead of just showing every word that the narrator says, only the most important words pop up on the screen. I am not using the word "pop" accidentally. That is because when the text pops up, the video makes a popping noise which also alerts the students that what has just popped up is an important detail.
The creators also did an excellent job of selecting which content to include in their videos. One of teh problems with World History is that it is basically endless. You could teach an entire college course on virtually every individual topic. So it is very easy to "hit the viewer with a fire hose" of information. One thing i like to remind teachers is that "if everything is the most important thing about a topic... then nothing is important." You have to be able to identify the essential "gotta know" of the topic. Infonow does a great job of doing this which makes it very useful for class.
I tried to dig around a little but I could not figure out who is behind the Infonow channel. Whomever it is really understands using edutainment to teach kids. The understand how to use many tricks to get kids to pay attention and to hone in on important details. The group is from Panama but the English versions of the videos sound great. The only problem I found is that there are only a few topics covered right now. I really hope they continue to make content as it is truly amazing!