Photo Credit: Bernhard Benke via Compfight

Get ready for a Fall teaching trend: The folks over at YouTube EDU are encouraging students and teachers to make educational rap videos. They have gathered this list of the 10 of the best educational raps on YouTube. The topics range from Martin Luther’s 99 Theses’ to state capitals to factoring.

Some of the videos are generating millions of hits, meaning there is strong demand for these videos. And it’s a chance for teachers and students to have some fun while reinforcing concepts (and also a way for teachers and schools to raise money from YouTube’s revenue sharing program… perhaps as a way to fund more computers or iPads for a classroom?). Will we see the Tupac of Trigonometry emerge as an Internet celebrity? What about an Eminem of Microeconomics? Or a Gill Scott-Heron of History? Perhaps the revolution will be televised - in classrooms via the Internet - after all.

“Teachers are busy thinking about how to make the next school year more interesting and engaging for a generation of kids with supposedly ever-shortening attention spans,” YouTube staff said in an email. “Well, for a start, they could bring more raps to the classroom.”

They give special plaudits to Westerville South High School in Ohio who’ve had more than one MILLION views of their five math raps, including more than 400,000 views on this video about factoring.

At Wired Academic, we are delighted to see a comeback of educational rap videos! Such videos were popular on a public TV show called Square One that taught students math using a mix of skits, and music videos in the 1980s and 90s …  at the same time MTV music videos were wildly popular. Here’s an example of the videos from that show: