Thursday, October 8, 2009

Thing 5a

No offense Caroline, but one frustration many of the teachers I work with and interns/student teachers I have had in the past have had was that You Tube is blocked in the classroom. In our past reading series, there was a very interesting story about the life of Lou Gehreg. Each year my students would become so interested in him and his life -- they would read other books, research, etc. and I would look for videos of his famous speech (the full speech was quoted in the story). The only videos I could find were on You Tube. This same cycle would happen in every subject in many classrooms in 4th grade.
While looking for blogs today, I came upon a blog, 21centuryedtech, that discussed safe ways to view You Tube videos. http://21centuryedtech.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/you-tube-in-the-classroom-ways-you-can-say-yes/. I thought it was very interesting that he made sure to go over certain steps you need to go through before using any of these sites:
Bringing YouTube into the classroom requires a teacher to carefully search, screen, and find videos that compliment learning objectives . Once the video is found it must be properly incorporated in the unit of study. Once these key points have been satisfied, it is time to investigate ways to make the video viewable in the educational setting.
I look forward to going back to school after Fall Break and try the sites he suggests. This could add a new world of videos, clips, etc. to my students' learning.
Posted by at

3 comments:

  1. JessicaOctober 14, 2009 at 11:59 AM

    There are ways to convert YouTube videos to videos that can be used in the classroom. I haven't done it yet, but I'm sure I will need to when we loose Safari Montage.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Caroline Bucky-BeaverOctober 21, 2009 at 7:31 AM

    No offense taken :) I understand that there is a wealth of great resources on YouTube, but there is also soooooo much content that is objectionable, which is partially the reason why I haven't led the fight yet to unblock YouTube. However, using some of the practices (and there are more that weren't mentioned in the blog post you cited), to gain access to the videos is a great work around!! Thanks so much for sharing this post!

    ReplyDelete
  3. JulieOctober 28, 2009 at 12:43 PM

    Thanks for sharing this link. I share your frustration! There are several videos I would have liked to use in professional learning sessions, but even though I had heard there were work-arounds, I just didn't have time to look into it and unfortunately that was a loss for the teachers in those sessions, just as your students are losing out on opportunities to have some great multimedia content incorporated into their learning. I think I need to challenge myself to look into ways to make the video content accessible instead of giving up so easily :) Thank you for the inspiration to give it a shot. I hope you'll blog about how it goes for you!

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)