This is a guest post from Rushton Hurley, the founder of Next Vista for Learning.

Teachers have a love-hate relationship with cool projects. They often find the extra time one requires a burden, but love seeing what the students do when given room to see that they’re capable of taking their talents to another level.

This semester, if taking something on to help your students tap their talents in new ways, you might consider having them participate in NextVista.org’s Service via Video 2017 contest. The contest challenges them to tell the story of a service effort in their community in two minutes or less.

Here are the finalists from last year.
You might assign or show your students the set and ask them which ones they thought were most compelling and why.

Here’s one of the winners from 2015, about the Palo Alto Humane Society:

At core, the goal is to have students learn that when their work can be powerfully helpful for others, they are capable of more quality than they might have thought. And learning that their talents can make a difference in their communities can strengthen their confidence, too!

Learn more at: http://www.nextvista.org/projects/serviceviavideo/info.phtml