Happy New Year! and YouTube

Welcome to 2012! I hope you all had a relaxing break. It was fun to read what folks were thankful for technology-wise and see some of your goals in the last post. To me, it's amazing how quickly document cameras, projectors, and ready student access in the classroom have become something we've just come to expect and rely on in our daily lives as teachers. I think that's real progress--seeing technology as a reliable, essential ingredient to making teaching easier and learning more engaging, thus enhancing our Classroom 10 objectives.

Now, onto this week's post: YouTube. I suspect you are all using video in some way, shape, or form in the classroom, so I thought I'd take a few minutes (paragraphs) to talk (write) about YouTube. As you know, YouTube is blocked at school for students, but it is open to teachers. Please note that if you ever get an Access Denied! warning as a teacher, you likely only need to log off and log back on to solve the problem. This video explains the problem and the solution.

Back to YouTube. Yes, there is lots of content on YouTube that is inappropriate and just plain stupid, but that shouldn't stop us from exploring, using, and sharing the incredible resources available there with our students. In fact, I'm betting most of you already do. This blog post offers tips for making YouTube easier to use in the classroom. Also, if you scroll down to the bottom and look at the comments, you'll see a reference to YouTube for Schools. Once we have our school Google accounts set up (coming later this spring) we'll register our schools. However, in the meantime, you can still check out the "Edu" side of YouTube here, and I encourage you to do so! For instance, do you know about Kahn Academy? Kahn Academy (whose videos are readily available through their site or YouTube channel) offers a huge range of short educational videos/tutorials. Then there are the incredible array of MIT, Stanford, and other university courses that are available. It's really something! Certainly, there may not be something for everyone, but as access to education content is becoming more open and available we need to know about these resources and share them with students when appropriate.

For this week's assignment, after you've looked over some of the links I shared, I'd like you to share how YOU are using content from YouTube (or other video resources such as Discovery Streaming, Vimeo, TeacherTube, etc.) in your classroom.