Speaker 1: Today I want to talk about this idea of creating immersive learning experiences for students but without having to like spend a gazillion dollars and buy all these things what are like some simple ways you can create immersive experiences for your students. I'd like to thank Samsung for for sponsoring this video. Let's jump into it. ♪ Woo. ♪ We've all seen room transformations. I've done them myself. They are super fun. But for some of us, with that dream on a budget, it's hard to come up with this sort of room transformation for every unit, or for even once a quarter. It can be a lot of money. But there are things around your school, around your room that you might be able to rethink how you're using them. You might be able to repurpose stuff and just sort of reimagine, given some of the stuff that you already have and that can create this immersive learning experience. And what we mean by that is really creating spaces and places for kids to feel like they're in the midst of something, to almost forget that they're in a classroom or in a school and you're creating these moments where you are transforming the learning experience for students and making it something that they are a part of and not just being sort of like blasted with information or something like that. So the first one is to think about where you're teaching this material. You can choose when and where to read. I think one of the easiest ways to do this is to just take a walk around your school with that lens of how is what I'm doing in class, how can it fit into somewhere? Maybe it's the hallway, maybe it's your lunchroom or dining hall, Maybe it's the creepy school basement that you bring battery-powered candles down from that you get at the dollar store and it's something we do every year. Maybe it is in the back stairwell, in a field next to the school. Maybe it's in front of the school, in the steps. Maybe there's a weird side little staircase like we have at school that you use. So what you're doing is you're kind of walking around and seeing where's the best place to teach what you're teaching. So a couple of ways that we've done this in the past is we have done everything from blacked out our windows in our classroom and sat in there and read ghost stories. Sometimes we go to the creepy school basement with battery powered candles and we read ghost stories down there or we read a certain text or a short story like Edgar Allen Poe in the basement of the school is really great. It looks very Silence of the Lambs is all I'm gonna say. Outside of our school, this very large field and sometimes we'll go out and read certain stories there or do activities there. Sometimes it is something as simple as finding like this little hillside, some grassy knoll on the side of our school. And that's where we read the final chapter of Lord of the Flies last year. And it was really fun because the kids got to act out certain parts. You get them outside for a moment, you get them engaged in something, and it is just a step away from the norm. And sometimes that's enough to shift like a decent day to an incredible day. Sometimes it's just moving the furniture that's in your classroom. So for our classroom, one of the things that we did for Merchant of Venice, for instance, right? We're reading Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare and we set up the standing desks in such a pattern that it looked like a courtroom. And then we took our smart boards. We have a Samsung interactive display in our room. And all I did was project a picture onto this. And then I sat behind it with my judge robe on and my little gavel. And it made it look like I was sitting at a judge's desk table thing that judges sit at. I don't know, I'm gonna quote that often, but it was just really fun because you're just repurposing the stuff that's in your room and then everyone is standing in the location that their character should be standing in. We've done the same thing with Of Mice and Men where we've kind of taken the Samsung board and we project something up there that looks like a bunkhouse, that looks like the background of wherever we're reading right now. So if we're reading Of Mice and Men, we make a bunkhouse up there and then the kids act out what we're doing in front of this. I've tried this other ways, like using a projector, it didn't work as well. I tried to draw it in chalk on the wall. That was a fail, because guess what? Kids bump into chalk and then it just looks like, looks like a shaky version of a bunk house. So we found that the Samsung Interactive Board worked really well in that case because you could leave it up there. So putting it up on your smart board is a really great idea as well. And then there were other times that, you know, reading certain parts of Merchant of Venice, we took the kids to this weird back stairwell that this picture doesn't really do it justice because you can't see the drawings on the wall, but that's what happens when you ask a kid to take a picture. We created a space where we try to mimic the Globe Theater. Now you can do this in your school's gymnasium, perhaps, on the bleachers, you could do it in the, you know, wherever you have plays and shows in your school. You can do it on the front steps of your school. But what you're trying to do is create this tiered, you know, arena type of a feel, and with a few props that you can find in the school or just reimagine or repurpose things, but you're creating this experience by just changing the location or the layout of your classroom. Now, another thing we've done is, I kind of went into this a little bit, but it is sort of looking around your room and seeing how can you reorient your classroom or how can you reorient something in your school to sort of repurpose it. So one of my favorite things that we've done over the years is, as I mentioned, we do ghost stories. this every year as part of a unit on oral tradition. We typically do it around Halloween. I have like tea light candles and then I have like larger candles that I bought from Amazon. My original vision was to hang these from the ceiling to go like full Harry Potter. I could not find a way to make it work well but I found that just putting the candles around the room, pulling all the shades tight and turning off all the lights in the room created this kind of magical experience And then what we did was on the smart board again, you just go on YouTube and you find a fireplace. The board that we have, the Samsung Interactive Display, has an ability to raise, you can have different levels for the board. So the stand that it's on has a little remote control and it simply moves up and down. So you move it down to the right level. And I used to have a rocking chair, but this year we just used a stool because things go missing sometimes. You don't write your name on every single thing that's in your classroom. So, we sat there and we read ghost stories to the boys. Sometimes we sit next to the fireplace when we're reading children's books in school and we have the kids sit on little pieces of carpet or just on the floor in front of us while we're studying like plot development and we're doing that through children's books. It just is another way to take what's already in your room and you're just reimagining the space that you're in to slightly change the way that you're doing stuff. Another thing we do is this. We all have students that love to read aloud and to participate in class and other students that have a really hard time finding an access point in the class activities. And these students then lose interest because they're now actively participating in class. A great way to pull those reluctant students into class activities is by giving them the special role of sound engineer. That means they are in charge of playing sound effects and music that fit certain scenes within any text you're reading in class. So just imagine for a second that you're preparing a lesson for students and while you do so you take a moment to think about what sound effects or music might go best with that reading. So if there's a part in the reading where the tension is building between two characters or there's romance in the air which with the right music can make this part really funny and really effective. where someone in your story is feeling a sense of hope or excitement or love in their life. You can have music playing behind these scenes that perfectly fits and enhances the reading. Now when you're using sound effects in class, your sound engineer is enhancing the reading by playing perfectly placed audio effects when there is a knock at the door, when there's a doorbell ringing, or trumpets are playing to announce the arrival of royalty, horses riding into a scene. There's a number of things that you can pick out in any text that sound effects would just be the perfect addition to. Now the benefits of doing this are many. One, you're getting students that maybe don't typically pay attention to pay attention. You're getting kids that might not otherwise want to or be a little bit nervous to participate to participate. And you're giving those kids a position that everyone loves because when done at the right moment, music and sound effects played over the reading light up the entire class. Now, another thing that we've noticed in our classroom is that students that struggle with reading sometimes struggle with a lack of what's known as base knowledge, which simply means that if a student can't picture what is being presented in the text, they have a hard time picturing that and then they have a hard time following along in the story. So for instance, if you're reading a book that takes place in a bunkhouse in Southern California, Some students might not know what that looks like, but by simply putting up a picture of it as you're reading, it helps kids to understand, oh, this is where this is taking place, and then they can dive into what is being read about. Similarly, if students don't know what a marketplace in Kenya looks like, or on a boat in the Mediterranean Sea surrounded by white cliffs and beautiful crystal clear water. Now, when you do this, there's two options. You can either create something that the students are gonna stand in front of and feel like they are immersed within the scene or they're slides that students can advance through as you're reading or as the setting is changing while you're reading a story. But what you're really doing in this moment is making reading come alive. School can be utterly boring, but by making these small shifts, we're doing what Walt Disney would refer to as surprise and delight. We're sprinkling magic on our lessons and that increases student engagement and helps kids want to come to class. One of the ideas that we've done over the course of the years is sometimes it's about letting students not just sit in their seat. So I have a friend of the YouTube channel, Kate the Sleepy Teacher, and Kate does this really great idea every year where she flips the student desks over. And the way her desks are, that when they're flipped over, the kids can sit in it like it's a lounge chair. And I thought that was a really great idea. So one time we were learning about imagery, I wanted my students to really kind of imagine and not just put their heads down on their desks. I thought they would just fall asleep and my idea is, well, my idea lends volume to sleep also, but you'll see, it's a little bit different. I had students sit or lay anywhere they wanted in the room. We then play a poem and the poem I usually play is by a friend of mine, Derek C. Brown, and he has this really wonderful poem called A Finger, Two Dots, and Then Me. And I will link that in the description box below in case you wanna check it out. So as the kids are laying on the floor, Their job is to close their eyes and to listen to the words and to see what they can imagine, right? So we're talking about imagery. What words did the writer use to create images in your head, vivid images in your head? Again, we didn't have to go anywhere. We didn't change anything. It was the same exact lesson. It was just where the kids were that changed this from something normal to something extraordinary. And look, the last thing is, I think the dollar store is a really wonderful place or the thrift store to get really great stuff to slightly enhance what you're doing. Maybe it's a mustache. Maybe it's a wig. Maybe you can buy like a toy sword or a knife for your class or something that like your characters have or are carrying on them. Some small costume piece that you can get that costs you anywhere from a dollar to $5. And in doing this, you're literally allowing students to transform how they look. One year we did Lord of the Flies and I allowed students to take Crayola washable markers and they just painted their faces with them. And it was awesome because we were talking about how Jack takes this, you know, the way the author describes it as like shifting into savagery on the island. And so the kids were allowed to change their look. Now, look, I'll tell you, you might get a little pushback when they go to the next class, kids walking around with marker all over their faces or fake mustaches, but look, I don't want those mustaches back, man. I'm not doing a wash your face after class. It's a little weird for me to say that, you know, when you're 14, and it's just kind of funny to walk around the school like that. Again, these are small shifts that have huge changes in the classroom. What we're doing is we're creating immersive experiences for students, and some of that is using the technology that's in your classroom. Sometimes it's using small purchases or just repurposing the things that are in your classroom and your school. Now look, what happens and what works this year just may not work next year, right? Kids are gonna change every single year. There's no one size fits all in education. So you might have to tweak it from year to year. You might have to tweak it from class to class. I have classes that some of these ideas don't work with. I have too many students in one big giant class and we can't just lay wherever we want because everyone's gonna be laying on top of one another and that gets weird. So instead, you have to maybe shift or change or think about how you're gonna make these experiences a little bit different for each class. but it makes you excited to come to class. It makes you excited to see the surprise and delight in students' eyes when you're just making these tiny, small changes when you don't have the budget for a massive room transformation and to just make these little changes that are going to light up a kid's day and make a memory that they'll remember forever. Look, I'd like to thank Samsung for sponsoring this video. You can find out all about the Samsung Interactive Display that I could not understate how much I love. Look, y'all know that I don't talk about anything, I don't mention anything unless I think that it's a really tried and true and wonderful product. So you can get all of that information about Samsung's interactive display below. I would love to know in the comments section, what are you all doing to make these small little shifts that the rest of us might be able to use in our classroom? How are you taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary in your classroom? That's it, gang. Peace.