Great videos for use in class

I've mentioned the website ted.com in several of my previous posts.

Last night, I was catching up on a few emails with recommended links in them and ended up at a great site called learn.ist which itself has some great suggested sites in its article:

 Web 2.0 Tools For The Classroom.

I have bookmarked some of the recommended Tools to come back to later, but I wanted to mention one of them in this post.

I followed the link to TED-Ed.  I have just been watching a fascinating video about Why is there a 'b' in doubt?

http://ed.ted.com/lessons/beyond-the-shadow-of-a-doubt-gina-cooke

There are other potentially videos we could use in our classes on TED-Ed.  And the good thing is that they usually last around 3 minutes.  

And then, they have follow up activities.  Under 'THINK', for 'doubt', they have a mixture of multiple choice comprehension questions about the content of the video, plus some research for students to do - for example, to find other words with silent letters in them and find out about the history of them.

Next, they can click on 'DIG DEEPER' where they will find suggestions for more related activities and links to sites where they can find more information.

On the spelling theme, there is another video I'd recommend by the same educator - Gina Cooke - on 'Making sense of spelling'.   It would be useful for training students to remember words that contain similar spelling patterns - eg two and twice.

http://ed.ted.com/lessons/making-sense-of-spelling-gina-cooke

Have a great week.  I've got lots of different projects to balance right now - so there's no 'doubt' that I'll be busy and challenged this week!  Hope your week is busy, challenging and fun and inspiring too!