As I plan for the upcoming year, it is more important than ever for me to have ready-made sub plans. My district is going to all virtual learning to start the year, but all the details haven’t been hashed out yet and we could change to blended or in person instruction beginning second quarter. Taking those things into account, I want to be prepared in case I’m not able to teach my classes, or at least as prepared as I can be, which is where my ready-made culture videos come in!
My first few years teaching, I used a variety of hand me down travel DVDs about Spain and Latin America as my sub plans. While there were some good nuggets of information in the videos, as a general rule, they were outdated or not very engaging. So I jumped at the chance to explore new options when my school went one-to-one with chromebooks, since now, my students could watch videos on their own devices. I began creating ready-made Google Forms that included links to different culture videos. Sometimes I create Forms that line-up to specific points of my curriculum, for example for Day of the Dead or videos about tacos that complement my food unit. Other times, I create multi-use video lessons that include a variety of video options for students to choose from. These lessons can be used at any point during the school year and are great emergency lesson plans! Below is my process for creating these multi-use video lessons.
How I create my multi-use video lessons:
- I find videos about a variety of topics on the internet. It is important to find videos about a variety of topics so that students can choose videos that appeal to their interests. I usually focus on cultural videos and find the majority of the videos on YouTube. However since I eventually insert links into my Google Form, the videos can come from anywhere. When I’m looking for videos for my Spanish 1 and 2 students, I select culture videos in English or with Spanish subtitles, however for my upper level students I try to find videos in Spanish.
- After I have a variety of videos, I create a Google Form with the choices. I give a short summary of each of the video choices for students to choose from. I set up the Form so that when students select a video choice they are led to another page where they can find the link for the video and a video specific response question.
- Once the Google Form is created, I have a ready-made sub plan that I can use whenever I want. The best part: since I include so many videos for the students to choose from I can use the same Google Form over and over! I tend to use the same Google Form no more than 2-3 times per year so that students are seeing the same options over and over again.
