YouTube, GoogleVideo, and TeacherTube

I had never really played around much with YouTube, except for links from others that I had received in emails. I ended up searching YouTube and came across some excellent short clips to demonstrate how to do/make things. One was for making a simple Origami “box” that kids could keep in their desks. There were also some other good instructional ones make by kids. Also, there are some great ones to show various knitting techniques, so I used those as needed for a couple of projects I’m currently working on…problems solved without trying to figure it out on my own through trial and error.

I’d seen one of the Did You Know videos before, from a link from a friend’s email. I like the remixing and the improvements with more visuals. I guess I do see value in remixing/remaking to make content more personal.

Of course there are concerns with sites like YouTube in an educational setting. At school as well as home, content for children needs to be monitored. It’s our job as educators to monitor that at school and I’d tell parents that there can be value from their children using YouTube with supervision.

I loved TeacherTube! I found some great videos. One showed how to make a poster using Excel, so I tried that out and made a new poster for my classroom. Another used time elapsed photography to show plant growth, which would be great for my science unit on plants. There were also some very funny ones, one of which I embedded in a previous post. At this point, I don’t think I would actually post on TeacherTube, but rather use some of the great videos that are already there. The same concern holds true with Teacher Tube as YouTube, but parents probably would be more open minded about their children using that site.

My best find on TeacherTube was “Free Tech Tool for Struggling Readers.”
I went to the Word Talk site and downloaded/installed the application. It was very easy to use and would be WONDERFUL to have that installed in our computer labs. Since it’s used with Word documents, it would be great to have that capability for struggling readers and English language users to assist them on various assignments.

Hmmm…I wonder if there is anyone reading this who could authorize getting that into our computer labs?!?!