At this time last year my students were starting to get antsy and I was starting to think of some fun ways to keep them excited about learning even as they were starting to get excited about the end of the school year. One of the things that I did to keep them engaged was to have them teach some short lessons on their favorite topics from our computer science curriculum. I wish that I had access to Tract when I did that last spring because it would have made my planning a lot easier and my students’ lessons a lot better.
Tract is a free service that I’ve featured a handful of times during this school year. You can read my initial overview of Tract here. In short, the whole concept behind Tract is to provide a structured, peer-to-peer learning platform. On Tract teachers create classroom accounts that their students join. Teachers can then let students go down any learning path of their choice or follow a course suggested by their teacher (take a look at these five Genius Hour activities in Tract). Either way, students learn from video lessons and challenge activities created by other students on the Tract platform.
Learn Through Teaching Lesson Plan
Tract isn’t just a passive learning platform on which students watch video lessons and complete some challenge activities. As I alluded to above, Tract can be used by students to create lessons for other students to complete. To that end, Tract has recently published a new free lesson plan called Learn Through Teaching.
Tract’s Learn Through Teaching free lesson plan was developed by Esther Wojcicki. She is Tract’s co-founder and Chief Learning Officer, an award-winning educator, and the author of How to Raise Successful People. The Learn Through Teaching lesson plan is designed to be carried out over the course of seven weeks. Each week has its own mission for students to complete. A mission is a task or series of tasks for students to complete. Each mission is connected to short student-produced videos about the task(s) at hand.
The first five lessons in Tract’s Learn Through Teaching lesson plan could be completed in a typical class meeting as they have a suggested timeframe of forty minutes or less. The last two lessons each have a suggested timeframe of two hours. It is in the last two lessons that students record and edit their video lessons, review each other’s work, and make revisions before publishing their final lessons.
Watch this short video for an overview of Tract’s Learn Through Teaching lesson plan.
As I look out my window and see some signs of spring I can start to see the end of the school year just over the horizon. The Learn Through Teaching seven-step lesson plan could carry you and your students to that horizon to end the school year on a high note.
Reminder, sign-up for Tract with the code BYRNE to get your free classroom account!
Other Ways to Use Tract This Spring
If having students create their own learning paths in Tract doesn’t seem like the right fit for your classroom at this time, there are other ways to use Tract that don’t require students to develop lessons. You can create a Tract classroom account (use the code BYRNE to get free access) then let your students explore some of the many interesting learning paths available to them in Tract.
All of the Tract learning paths feature student-created video lessons. The learning paths cover such a wide array of topics that there is sure to be at least one learning path of interest for every student in your classroom. Students will find learning paths about making and playing video games, creating TikTok videos, photography and videography, music, sports, and a whole lot more.
Students earn digital coins for completing learning paths in Tract. Those digital coins can be used for good by redeeming them for digital prizes that benefit others. For example, students can redeem 250 coins to make a donation of one meal via Second Harvest of Silicon Valley toward the UN Sustainable Development Goal of zero hunger. Students can also trade in coins for 1:1 mentorship sessions with content creators. You could create a little classroom competition to see which student can earn the most digital coins in the month of April or May.
Watch this video for a complete overview of the teacher and student perspective’s of Tract.
A Calendar of Tract Events to End the School Year
If you’d like even more ideas about how to use Tract for fun learning activities to wrap-up the school year, take a look at the new Tract Community Calendar. I’m particularly interested in the Earth Week tasks in which students can earn double coins for completing Earth Day-aligned learning paths.
