I usually just do a year-end list of The Best Videos For Educators and many other topics, but it gets a little crazy having to review all of my zillion posts at once. So, to make it easier for me — and perhaps, to make it a little more useful to readers — I’m going to start publishing mid-year lists, too. These won’t be ranked, unlike my year-end “The Best…” lists, and just because a site appears on a mid-year list doesn’t guarantee it will be included in an end-of-the-year one. But, at least, I won’t have to review all my year’s posts in December…

You might also be interested in:

Part Two Of The Best Videos For Educators — 2010

The Ten Best Videos For Educators — 2010

And you might also want to see The Best Funny Videos Showing The Importance Of Being Bilingual — Part One and The Best Videos Illustrating Qualities Of A Successful Language Learner.

Here are my choices for The Best Videos For Educators In 2011 — So Far:

Near the end of the extensive Bloom’s Taxonomy lesson I describe in my book, I show some fun videos demonstrating the thinking levels through scenes from Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean. Links to those videos can be found at The Best Resources For Helping Teachers Use Bloom’s Taxonomy In The Classroom.

The creators of those videos have now made some follow-up ones.

The Pirates of The Caribbean video has been shortened, and the sound has been enhanced so it’s easier to hear the words:

And a sequel to the Star Wars one has been made using clips from The Empire Strikes Back:

Dan Ariely has done a lot of research on motivation. Here’s a short video of him talking about pay for performance. I was particularly struck by something he says near the end. He asks if we were going in for surgery, would we want to tell the surgeon that if he/her does his job well we’ll give him a lot of money and if he doesn’t do his job well we’ll sue him, or would we rather have him just concentrate on doing his job?

Perhaps advocates of merit pay for teachers might want to think about that question, too?

If you want to teach the difference between correlation & causation, this could be the video for you…..It could be, that is, if you don’t mind using a beer commercial (Showing amazing stuff to the beer is supposed to make it amazing 🙂 ):

Sesame Street has a fun and useful interactive YouTube video on the scientific method. I’m adding it to other interactive videos on The Best — And Easiest — Ways To Use YouTube If, Like Us, Only Teachers Have Access To It (where I also explain how I use them in class):

The PBS News Hour produced this segment on self control and young people. It uses financial literacy as an initial hook, but it’s mainly about the famous marshmallow test and a recent updated study:

Watch the full episode. See more PBS NewsHour.

If you skip through an off-color remark made by the celery near the beginning of this video, it could be a short and fun way to introduce the idea of personification to students. Check out “Meltdown: Where Last Night’s Leftovers Battle For Their Lives”:

MELTDOWN from Dave Green on Vimeo.

Transocean (greatly responsible for last year’s Gulf Oil Spill) just gave their executives huge bonuses because of their…safety record. Jon Stewart does a great short bit on it. It seems to me this is a good example of either Campbell’s Law, or and example of how incentives don’t work, or both.

Well-known and respected author/researcher David Berliner (I’ve posted about his work several times) gives a very understandable explanation of “Campbell’s Law” in this video. The “law” says:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it was intended to monitor.

It’s an important critique of the use of standardized tests in schools for teacher or student evaluation.

The night Diane Ravitch was the guest on the Daily Show was amazing! Here are three clips from it:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Crisis in the Dairyland – For Richer and Poorer
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

And here’s a segment from yet another Daily Show:

An amazing book, Teaching 2030:What We Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools–Now and in the Future, was published this year. An animated summary of the book is now available, and I’ve embedded it below. It’s worth watching both for the content and for the visuals.

Based on the fact this video has over nine million views on YouTube, I may be the last person who has seen it, but it’s still a great video to get students to think more carefully about their writing:

Feedback is welcome.

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