In 3rd grade 30% of class time is still the teacher lecturing at students. Another 30%-40% with hands on activities that are not educationally oriented. Maybe 15% of class time is actually constructive hands on learning, that has been thought-out by a teacher and properly implemented.
Youtube videos have a place in classrooms, as a learning tool. One problem is that teachers aren’t very good with technology, and technology isn’t well integrated. Teachers are still scared to download and share with each other material. This means that they don’t have lots of downloaded content ready to go, to be sorted through in a few seconds by the teacher. School boards are too scared of copyright lawsuits.
A student can ask a question during a lecture if the teacher says something they don’t understand, or even chime in with their own insights. These kinds of facilitated discussions is where a surprising amount of actual learning happens.
Everything the students do hands-on is educational whether they realize it or not.
And 97.2% of statistics cited by randos on the internet are made-up bullshit.
I’m going to add my voice as a current educational researcher: “Edutainment videos” absolutely do not teach kids, no matter how engaging they are.
Sometimes kids do come away with them with some facts. They’ll remember some fact about imaginary numbers, or black holes, or whatever, and people will go “wow, that kid has learned so much!” But learning some disconnected facts, out of context, without forcing the learner to actually engage with the ideas and explain and defend their understanding isn’t real learning.
I also thing your “sage on a stage” reference is out of touch with the majority of elementary classrooms today, although I agree that experiences vary across the country and the world.
Some kids learn best being talked to, some kids need a more interactive approach, and there are others not covered in that. The important thing to realize is that there is no “one size fits all” strategy to reaching kids, and all you’re pointing out here is that teachers are already implementing more than one methodology. Now I can’t count on the particular statistics you provided, but the fact is that teachers try to engage students at different levels where they can, and the amount varies day to day.
Can YouTube be used to help teach some lessons? Sure. Teachers have been using instructional videos since the possibility was made available to them. Some teachers already use YouTube videos in class. But it shouldn’t take center stage. You might be able to find a YouTube video students can be engaged by, but, unlike a teacher, you won’t find a YouTube video the kids can engage with.
I have a kid in elementary school. Those percentages are deceiving, if they are true.
A lesson at my kid’s school will be maybe 3 minutes of lecture, 3 minutes of questions, 5 minutes of reinforcement activity. Repeat. Activities range from worksheets that require writing, reading, drawing, critical thinking, and creativity to building things to reading aloud to one another. Then there are the special subjects they do with their specials teachers, like music, STEM, PE, and art. They do some videos in the regular classroom. Teacher doesn’t use a chalk board. She has a laptop and projector.
Also, in third grade pretty much any activity is educational, including recess. For kids that young, the learning is as much about how to learn and social soft skills as it is about reading, science, math, etc.
For a tour in how badly video-centered learning is, go read about the Houston ISD take over and how well that kind of curriculum is working out. I don’t think it’s even been a whole year yet and all the parents are incredibly pissed off.
I’d say on the surface this seems to be a good idea. Back in my day (yeah, I know) there was a row of pay phones in a central location for students to use when needed, and one or two other stand-alone phones in other parts of the school.
Pay phones (in the US at least) are harder to come by these days.
All this about YouTube in the classroom is completely off-topic. All of the primary schools I know around here have strict policies about banning phones in class. Students need to turn the phones into the office at the beginning of the day or make sure their phone is silent/invisible in their bag. AFAIK, those policies work. Phones, smart or dumb, are not for classroom use.
But, children have the rest of the day to text, post pictures and videos, and bully each other. There have been a few high-profile suicides and murders recently in the UK that have featured smart phones as an accelerant. This has led to a debate about banning phones for children.
Why should children have mobile phones? I realized as mine was getting older that if I left them home alone, even to run to the store, they would have no way of calling for help if something unlikely happened. I grew up with a land line in the house, but those are gone. The cheapest and easiest solution is to get a mobile for the kid. The mobile seems reasonable when they start going to secondary school on public transit, too. I have to admit that I don’t mind them organizing their own social life a bit more.
I might have picked up a dumb phone for that purpose, but like many people we had some slightly-obsolete smart phones in a drawer. So, here we are. If there was an easy way to borrow a dumb phone for a few years, that would have been an appealing option. This school is doing a good thing. The worst things seem to be happening with older kids, though, so I’m not sure a “childrens phone” movement will solve the problem.
