Screencast: Finding authentic sources for prompts

I say this often: textbooks are unmotivating, often based on bad pedagogy, and out-of-date as soon as they’re printed.  If you want to see your students motivated to work with language that interests them, you have to create your own material – or “steal” the great stuff that fantastic teachers like @SraSpanglish and @ZJonesSpanish and @muchachitaMJ are putting out there on the internet.

A couple of years ago I did a workshop on “Prompts with Power,” creating your own powerful writing and speaking prompts and finding the authentic sources to go along with them.  I wasn’t impressed with how the workshop went.  I didn’t feel like the attendees were really empowered to go out and do this on their own.  Let’s face it, if it keeps you up into the wee hours finding your own materials, you’re going to quit.  So I decided to do a screencast on how I find authentic materials to support my prompts, so if you want, you can go back and watch and re-watch to get used to how it works, or how I work it anyway.

This screencast makes it look like I did this in five minutes, but that’s only because the software only allows me five minutes of recording time.  I did this unit over about a day and a half, spending perhaps a total of 2-3 hours on it.  This is one of several activities that are part of that unit.