Week 9, Thing #20

I have been a fan of YouTube for quite some time. Though I can see its use in the classroom, I tend to use it more for entertainment purposes. I thoroughly enjoyed all of the videos that were sent by Classroom Learning 2.0; however, I was even more excited to search based on my the given criteria. I chose a video that was a book talk by a number of students. They critically analyzed, "Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days," by Jeff Kinney. This video was an easy choice for me because my goal was to find a real life example of how YouTube could be used in the classroom. I can imagine students would be thrilled to create a video giving their analysis of a given book they had read. I never knew embedding videos was this easy! I will be using this skill a lot.

In addition, I do see some of the obvious problems with YouTube, such as the ability to monitor content. A lot of school districts do not even allow access to YouTube due to some of the explicit content. The best answer to this dilemna is the resource, TeacherTube. This website is geared toward a more educational setting. Another downfall is that parents may not be interested in having a video of their child displayed for the world to see. I can argue both sides of that argument.

Finally, I think that YouTube/TeacherTube can be useful to show videos that others have developed as an aid in the classroom. Perhaps it could be a book talk, a movie clip, or a performance of some sort that could help in understanding a given concept.

Generally, I think YouTube is a good site with a lot of legit information...you just have to be willing to sift through a little garbage :0)