Throughout the school year I have published a handful of blog posts and videos about an exciting platform called Tract. The tract is a place where students can learn a wide range of topics from other students through a series of video and challenge activities. Things you’ll find on the tract include making video games, composing music, and even better photography lessons. You will also find many lessons on the “trends” in the middle school and high school world.
Tract teachers can register their classes for free and create a place where their students can teach each other (use the BYRNE code at https://teach.tract.app/ to get free access). This can be a great place to start when looking for some Genius Hour activities or looking for inspiration for fun activities that your students can do to introduce themselves and get to know each other. But now that summer has arrived (for my Northern Hemisphere friends) your students don’t have to stop using the tract.
Above level in the tract this summer
If you use tracts during the school year, you know that the emphasis of the platform is on helping students learn by not only showing them other students’ lessons but also creating video lessons about what they are interested in. To that end, there is a three-tier approach to student participation in the tract as students use the platform, which aims to “level up” students.
The levels that students move through in the tract are creator, authorized, and partner. As the graphic below shows, you can think of these levels as beginner, intermediate and advanced.
The important thing to note about each of these levels is that they all require students to make videos The first level asks students to respond to challenge activities by recording a short video to demonstrate learning. The second level asks students to go deeper into their responses and create their own lessons. The final level is where students not only create their own lessons for others to see, they also respond to others trying to level up.
This summer tract is hosting a free summer program for students in grades three through eight. Tract’s free summer program, called Virtual Summer Creator Camp, aims to help students improve their video creation, editing, and presentation skills. Through the guided Virtual Summer Creator Camp, students will go through a variety of activities ranging from the basics of video creation to the creation of stop motion videos to create the final cover image for their videos. Along the way they will also develop editing skills so they can add special effects, overlay text and graphics to their videos and create remixes of multiple videos.
Tract’s Virtual Summer Creator Camp will start tomorrow (June 27th) and will run for six weeks. You can learn more about it and register for free at summer.tract.app.
Bookmark these tract ideas for fall
I understand, now this announcement about Summer and Tract’s Virtual Summer Creator Camp may be a little too late for you to use it. In that case, keep the following ideas in mind to drop.
- Letting students choose their own learning path on the tract is a great way to find out what your students are interested in outside of the classroom. There are ways to learn about everything from nature photography to music making to Minecraft.
- Ready to use tracts, offers grade-specific lesson plans so that teachers can easily assemble in their classroom.
- TRACT can be a great platform to introduce your students to project-based learning. Read more about that idea here.
Meet the tract team and much more
The annual ISTE conference is starting today in New Orleans! If you want to get there, you can meet Ari Memer, co-founder of Tract, and other members of the Tract team at Lula Restaurant and Distillery on Monday nights between 6pm and 9pm.
If you do not visit ISTE, follow the hashtags: #ISTELive And #NotatISTE And # ISTELive22 See news of your favorite edtech tools like Tract. Or learn. Go to tract.app and sign up with the ISTE or BYRNE code and jump using tract.
Finally, to learn more about how tracts were created and how they work to protect students’ information, watch this video that I recorded with Ari Memor last autumn.
Published: The tract is an advertiser for FreeTech4Teachers.com