Encourage students to write through videos

In addition to text and image, do you use video as a way to generate writing situations? Here are some ideas on this subject!

Incentives to write, or writing prompts in English, are sentences, words or images that are offered to students to inspire and encourage them to write, while stimulating their thinking and imagination.

This technique is often used with a written scenario, but why not do it with the help of short videos?

Get inspiration from videos to write

The possibilities of subjects and themes to exploit are endless. Neurosciences, space discoveries, medicine, the ethics of certain scientific practices, the history or even the life of famous people or people with disabilities.

The aim of the exercise is to prepare sentences or questions to be completed by the students after watching the video. Here are sample videos and suggested writing situations.

Examples of videos that make you think

The site Teach Hub, a resource site for teachers, offers several videos with several ideas for writing situations for different ages.

For example, there is a video on education and its benefits. The first suggested activity is to write a text starting with: “Education is…”. Students must then define what education means to them, where education fits in their lives and why it is important. Another idea is to use a phrase from the video and ask the students to explain the meaning of the phrase “Education is a light in the dark”. Students must also give examples in human history where education has been a source of hope and a lever for emancipation.

Still on the same site, another video presents the technologies used to explore the brain Through time. The incentive to write is here to write an argumentative text in which the student speaks out for or against medical experimentation on animals. For the younger ones, the teacher asks the pupils to put themselves in the shoes of scientists and to explain how the experiment takes place.

These two examples show that these learning activities call on many skills, including writing, logic, critical thinking, the ability to argue and thinking about notions of ethics, while deepening notions science and developing students' general culture.

Some resources to find videos

The site Science classes has created a list of sites where you can find short videos in the field of science. The site mentions among other things, the program Découverte at Radio-Canada, This is not rocket science broadcast in France (Youtube) and the ONF, but also other videos such as mathematical or physical simulations.

In short, video, like text and images, is another way of creating writing situations.

Are you using videos in class to provoke writing situations?