Create a Great Playlist for Your Students: MentorMobEdu

During the app share session at edcampHill, I shared MentorMob*.

*January 14 edit – MentorMob changed its educational site name to LessonPaths early 2014. All links from this post are still valid!

MentorMob is a great site to create a learning playlist for your students. You can paste any link (video, audio, article), upload images or PDFs, and create short quizzes to test what the students have learned. I think it’s ideal for any level of students. It’s not only great for teachers with IWB or SMART Board, but for teachers to create  playlists for learning-centers.

Why I like this app:

1. All YouTube or Vimeo videos I selected for my students are in one place without the clutter of suggested videos or comments.
2. Documents or slides for learning can be directly added to the playlist so that teaching and learning time is not wasted.
3. Easy to view the entire playlist collection on the sidebar.
4. Sharing the playlist with students and parents is easy.

Here is an image of  my playlist. Uploaded Doc that will be followed by a video of the music the students will listen to. There is a list of videos and docs on the left side. The circled tools are for editing, sharing and more (copy, delete, or change privacy).

Create an Edu account. It’s easy!

1. Go to mentormob.com and click on the EDU site (left bottom).
2. Sign up using your email, Google, Facebook, or Persona accounts.

To create a playlist:

1. Click on the “Create” button on the top menu.
2. Fill in the title, description, type, category, & tags.
3. Decide whether your playlist will be public (can be viewed by all) or unlisted (only people you share the link will be able to view it). I like to share with teachers so I leave mine in public.
4. Hit the “Save and add content” bar.
5. Click on the + sign to add links, documents, or articles.
6. Add step info/ challenge questions.
7. You can click on the pencil to edit any step on the playlist and modify any way you want it.
8. You can embed your playlist on your blog/class website and have centers-like activities set in your classroom

One negative:

If your class blog is a WordPress.com like my blog, you will not be able to use its iframe code to embed the playlist. Fortunately, I use Edublogs and Google Sites so it’s not a problem when using MentorMob for school. The embedded playlist would look like this:

So for my music classes, I no longer use the YouTube playlist I created for my students. MentorMob is great with customer service on Twitter (@MentorMobEdu). I like browsing through playlists created by other teachers in other subjects, too.

Check it out! You’ll be glad you did!

@Doremigirl