To YouTube or Not to YouTube

The discussion board from class this week got me all riled up about YouTube and teaching 21st Century Learners. I wanted to repost some of my thoughts here and add to a couple of them as well. I would also recommend "Make Those YouTubes" by Marc Prensky; I found it to have a good idea and it was what really got me thinking.

Marc Prensky makes some great points in "Make those YouTubes." For one, like Prensky says, it allows for a great resouce of sharing teaching ideas; the more teachers that post quality instructional videos, the more quality instruction videos will be available. I think of Khan Academy, a mostly math based video site. I love searching Khan for videos because of the amount of videos and the fact that they are generally accepted as high quality. I even feel more comfortable searching for a Khan video as opposed to any old video on YouTube, because I don't feel like I have to filter through videos that are inappropriate for school. Which leads me to think that if we as educators buy into Prensky's ideas, we need to create a network (YouTube or otherwise) of trusted, educational videos. You might be thinking, well TeacherTube already exists. I think TeacherTube would be great for this forum, however as it stands right now, I find TeacherTube to have very limited, difficult to search for resources. As I stated before, though, the more teachers that post quality instructional videos, the more quality instruction videos will be available. Secondly, I agree with Prensky’s assertion that a concise video tutorial could be a much more effective learning tool than a linear PowerPoint that takes more time to develop and still requires a teacher explanation.

I often use YouTube to find videos for my lessons. Our district even provides a Firefox downloader for YouTube so that I can save YouTube videos as FLV files and insert them into my Smart Notebook presentations. This allows for no commercials and no school-inappropriate ads when I show the videos in my classes.The one drawback to using YouTube is I spend a lot of time searching and previewing videos to make sure they are relevant and appropriate. I think a better user base for TeacherTube may be the solution to this problem.

YouTube is blocked for students at our school, but not for teachers. I think that this is an appropriate safety measure at this point in time. When I read Prensky’s article my one worry was that posting videos of students would be against school privacy rules; which currently it would. I completely support teacher posted videos for classroom use, however having students post videos has more roadblocks. I do not doubt the benefit to students from creating videos (if you can teach something you probably know it…), but at this point in time I do not think that posting these videos would be allowed. Should those rules change? Maybe. But, for a first step, I think teachers creating quality to be shared is a great way to integrate 21^st Century technology. I also think that students creating videos to only be shown at their school in the classroom is a great compromise as well and would promote 21^st Century Skills.