History Projects and YouTube
YouTube History Project
This is a YouTube project that uses YouTube to assess the student’s understanding of history. This would be an excellent project to use as a final exam in order to asses how well the students grasp the information learned throughout the year. Refer to my article on YouTube in Education to see how to create groups in the classroom to perform YouTube projects. Use those groups when developing such history projects as this one.
Assign each group a time period to develop in their YouTube project. You may also allow the students to pick the era themselves, if you prefer. Explain that the students will be working on a project that focuses solely on the time period assigned to them. Allow them some free reign to develop the theme as they wish. Make sure the following elements are incorporated into the rubric.
- Displays understanding of the etiquette of the time period.
- Displays understanding of the use of and creation of tools during this time period.
- Displays an understanding of the political situation of the time period.
- Displays an understanding of the social scale of the time period.
- Displays an understanding of technology during this time period.
- Displays an understanding of social roles of this time period.
- Displays an understanding of the family life during this time period.
- Displays an understanding of how religion affected life choices in this time period.
Students should be required to develop a YouTube video project that will display their understanding of the events of this time period. Students should request that users of YouTube post ratings of the video when they view it. Students should also visit the videos of groups they are not in and rate them. In this way students will have more motivation to make a quality project and will be made to see the view of their peers on this project.
Give suggestions to students, as follows:
- Make a skit of a day in that particular time period.
- Make a skit of a major political event during this time period.
- Develop a video that reflects the lives of people that knew each other but lived in different social worlds, such as servants and masters.
This is a new twist on the idea of a final project. YouTube history projects like these require students to do research, organize and activate the information they have acquired.
This post is part of the series: YouTube in Education
This is a series that discusses various projects and ways to use YouTube in education.
