How Teachers Can Use Clickademics.com

Sisyphus was an ancient Greek king whose punishment from the gods was to roll a huge stone to the top of  a hill everyday. At the end of each day, the stone rolled to the bottom of the hill, ready for the next day's rolling. If you think about it, teaching can be very Sisyphusian. If you have several sections of the same subject, you teach the same lesson several times a day, you review it later in the week, you review it again before the test, and you still have to start the process over again the next year. This doesn't even include the absent students.

I created  my website Clickademics to do some of the repetition automatically, freeing teachers up for more creative projects and more individualized help. I film teachers giving their best lessons and make them available to students online.

Here are some ways that Clickademics can help teachers be more effective:

• If an upcoming exam covers material that is in a Clickademics lesson, the teacher can link to the video lessons as a study aid.
• If a student is struggling with a basic concept, and the teacher cannot take class time to go over it again, the teacher can direct the student to the lesson so that he or she can review at home.
• If students are absent, the teacher can have them review online at home instead of staying after school for a make-up lesson. This is especially helpful in schools where student athletes often miss the last class of the day to travel for a game since these athletes can rarely stay after class since it would conflict with sports practice.
• All students have different learning styles, and some students benefit from hearing a lesson taught in multiple ways.

More and more, teachers are encouraged to provide two challenging classroom experiences: more project based learning and differentiated learning. The problem for teachers is that hands-on, creative projects take a great deal of class time, and differentiated learning requires multiple lesson plans to help students with different learning styles and abilities. If the students could learn the basics using online-video, there could be more class time for these effective yet complicated lessons and projects.

Of course, all classroom concepts can be found in the textbook, but all experienced teachers know that the students who really need help with the material rarely go home and read everything they should. Online video is a much more effective teaching tool.

If you want to learn more about project based learning and differentiated instruction, check out these books: