Give a real world context to your students’ learning
Thomas Courtley
Education Specialist
You can take your pick. The internet is an endless source of news topics such as politics, current events, and natural disasters. Give a real world context to your students’ learning, to help them explore parallels and differences, develop informed opinions, and practise critical thinking.
Bring actuality into the classroom
Bring actuality into your classroom to helps students understand issues of global or national importance, and complex problems and challenges in today's world, such as how to resolve conflicts or control disease. By thinking about these issues, students learn to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills. It also helps them spot stereotypes and prejudice.
We know that students love digital quizzes, so why not bring the news into the classroom by implementing a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly news quiz? 👉 Feel free to check out a news quiz template for inspiration. Encourage your students to open their eyes to what is happening in the world they live in.
The power of visuals connected to actuality
People are hardwired to respond to imagery. The visual cortex is the largest system in the human brain. Reading is a skill we learn, as opposed to speaking and picture processing, which are abilities we’re all born with. It would be a pity if you didn’t use videos and imagery to encourage critical thinking.
The internet is a source of great (and less great) videos and imagery, many of which you can use without worrying about author’s rights. Select the best images linked to actuality or to what you are teaching at the moment in your classroom. Create complete lessons around 👉 present-day themes, provided with simple wording, interesting videos, and engaging imagery.
The LessonUp library, with lessons created by teachers from all around the world, is also an immense image and video collection. Why? Because at LessonUp we have created the ideal teaching platform to upload and present imagery, videos, and GIFs. Videos and images can be easily edited, provided of links, hotspots, audio messages, used as design templates, overlaid with all kinds of interactive features, dragged and dropped, and much more.
The sky's the limit when working with imagery within a LessonUp lesson!
