The Educational Law YouTube Assignment

As my regular readers know, I teach educational law courses here at Indiana University (soon I will be moving - check out my hat). But, I take pride in teaching not just educational law but other topics as well that school personnel need to have an idea about. We talk about globalization, curriculum decisions and other cool stuff, but one feature that I have made central to my courses is educational technology. It is something that sort of gets overlooked in most schools of education and especially in most educational leadership programs, so we try to do some ed. tech. stuff in my classes to compensate ... plus, I just think it is fun (yes, I am a geek).

Anyway, that all lead to me developing, in conjunction with my colleagues here at IU, a YouTube assignment for our pre-service educational law course. We have had great success with it and I get asked frequently about it, so I thought I would post the details up here on the blog. Here is the idea in short - the students use Web 2.0 tools to express their knowledge of educational law. It is not that much different than any other activity (say a skit in class), but it just uses cool tools. The learn a little educational law and a lot of technology and have a lot of fun in the process. That has turned out to be a pretty good combination.

Now that you are sort of scratching your head about this, let me tell you the options students have. Option 1, do a YouTube video as a group, or, option 2, do an alternative assignment by yourself. Just for now, let me tell you that the alternative assignments (here is the handout we use) involve students doing a podcast, blog entry, wiki entry, or YouTube comment.

Now, back to the YouTube clip. We tell the students to limit the YouTube to 3-4 min. This is already an extensive project and we don't want to make it much worse. We also award bonus points for the best videos and on the last night of class we talk about future directions and watch the best videos and give small awards (magnet to right using cafepress) to the winners. Anyway, we try to give them plenty of help, including an instructional video on how to do it all (below - if you want to understand this all more, watch the video). The students then submit their videos (most of them don't actually upload to YouTube - it is not required that they do) and we give a small grade for it, which most students do very well on.

The whole thing seems pretty complicated and daunting, but we have been amazed at the response of the students. We certainly challenged them, but they were more than up to the challenge. The videos and blogs and podcasts have been amazing. Really. Some of it is better than what I could have done. In fact, the thing we value the most perhaps, is that we found a way to reach the students we were not otherwise reaching. Most of the students that do the best, most creative videos are not the A students in the class. It has been a great assignment for us that melds together law, technology, collaboration ... and fun, and I recommend trying it with your classes as well. Challenge the kids (and yourself) ... you'll be amazed at what they can do when they are allowed to show off their 21st Century talents.

Instructional Video for Project: