25 Ideas for Whiteboard Videos

Years ago apps like ShowMe and Educreations helped to popularize creating whiteboard-style instructional videos. Today, screencasting tools like Screencastify and Google's Chrome screencast tool along with Flipgrid's whiteboard tool make it easy to create a whiteboard style video in your web browser. Regardless of the tool used, the basic premise is to draw on blank screen while talking at the same time. 

Often teachers make whiteboard videos to use as lessons for their students to watch independently. But having students make videos can be a great way to learn what they know about a topic and how they think about a topic. Here are twenty five topics that you could have your students make whiteboard videos about.

Science

• Why volcanoes erupt
• The water cycle
• Ocean tides
• Tectonic plates
• Inertia

Math

• Adding and subtracting fractions
• The Pythagorean theorem
• Slope intercept form
• Compound interest
• Long division

Social Studies

• Ranked choice voting
• Branches of government
• Latitude and longitude
• Map projections
• Gerrymandering 

Language Arts

• Parts of speech
• Phonics lessons
• Plot structure
• Prefixes and suffixes
• Types and structures of poems

Other

• Rules of various sports
• Bass clef and treble clef
• How to read a clock
• Verb conjugation
• How wi-fi networks work

Here's the easiest way to record a screencast on your Chromebook!

Climate Kids Helps Kids Learn About Climate Change

NASA's Climate Kids website has many excellent online and offline resources for teaching students about climate change. One of those resources is the Big Questions page. The Big Questions page guides students through the basic concepts and issues related to climate change. Six big questions are featured on the page. Students select a question to discover the answers through the exploration of a series of smaller questions. Each question is addressed with a mix of image, text, and video explanations.

The Climate Kids Big Questions are:

• What is climate change?
• Why is carbon important?
• What is the greenhouse effect?
• How do we know the climate is changing?
• How does climate change effect the ocean?
• What else do we need to find out?

Applications for Education

After working through the Big Questions you could have students play some of the Climate Kids online games which address topics including recycling, renewable energy, and climate history. Some of the hands-on activities featured on Climate Kids include re-purposing old clothing to make re-usable shopping bags, creating your own paper, and garden projects.

Climate Kids includes a page for teachers. On that page you can find a directory of resources aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards.