Denton Community College teacher creates YouTube channel for students

A teacher at Denton Community College has been getting ‘technical’ with new ways to engage with pupils – by creating a YouTube Channel and App that can help them with their studies.

Jordan Watson, 25, has been teaching at the school for three years and has been keen to explore different ways of keeping students engaged, especially outside the classroom with their English work.

“Something that I realised early on was how challenging many students in Year 10 and 11 find retaining and recalling key pieces of knowledge from the literature texts,” explained Mr Watson, as pupils are expected to recall a number of quotations and texts.

“Many of the students that I spoke to about this told me that they struggled with staying engaged with their revision, and this prompted me to try and find new ways of supporting them.”

This led him to develop an app called ‘QuoteMaster’ to help students with this particular problem, and is available on iOS and Android.

“Students can select a text from the menu and then complete a quiz that’s made up of 15 randomly selected questions, taken from a bank of more than 25 possibilities… Students can download the app for free, and I am looking to add an even wider range of GCSE text to it, based on feedback from colleagues and students around the country. ”

The feedback from students at Denton Community College was incredibly positive and the app has since proved popular, with more than 5,000 installations at this point.

But that’s not all Mr Watson has been doing to keep pupils sharp.

“In February last year, I created a YouTube channel with the intention of supporting students with other areas of English, and to try to instil a greater interest in the subject.

“The videos on my channel began as simple whiteboard-style videos with me talking over them, but in January I decided to take them a step further and appear in the videos myself. 

“I use a green screen (effectively just a green sheet that I’ve taped to the ceiling) which opens up a massive range of possibilities, as well as making the process of making the videos very entertaining!

“Students responded brilliantly to these videos, and it was lovely to have conversations on the corridors at school with those who’d enjoyed them and, most importantly, found them helpful.”

These videos have worked fantastically with the switch to lockdown, with the channel being ‘adapted’ to further support the work that the English Department has been setting out – even releasing a ‘revision song’!

“Society is in a strange and unprecedented situation right now. It goes without saying that there will be many challenges ahead for both students and teachers as they work to try and close gaps in learning throughout the coming academic year,” Jordan added. 

“The efforts from not only my own colleagues at DCC, but from other members of the teaching community around the country, have been nothing short of impeccable.”