We're Now on YouTube

I'm really not sure why I didn't think of this before....

Struggling to find something to do with the photostories that we are doing as part of our first major piece of thinwalled collaboration with our partners in Van Nuys, I decided to set up a YouTube channel.

It was just one of those things. I thought we could upload the .wmv files directly to our blogs and when we discovered we couldn't, I suddenly had about a dozen impatient teenagers needing to know what to do with the things they had finished. I went to Ourmedia as I had an account there from a few years ago. I found some really neat stuff that my class has placed online three years ago, but unfortunately I couldn't remember my password and the website was not being helpful in reminding me.

So on to YouTube we went.

I set up an account and gave the account information to the kids. Soon they had their stories uploaded, they were commenting on each other's stuff and after posting a link this account on twitter, their stories soon had about a dozen comments on them. Love my network.

This really has a lot of potential that I fully need to explore. I know that you can set up playlists that kids can use, leaving them videos on certain topics that you want them to watch. It seems that it would also be a great way to hook classrooms and students together, allowing them to explore projects that each other has made and view their playlists, giving them some sense of what is being studied in each place.

Is there danger to this? I guess possibly some, but really there is more danger of them being exposed to tasteless content than anything else. Is there garbage on YouTube? Tons of it. But there is that on my TV at home too and I don't see anyone screaming to ban that. We need to learn to take the good with the bad. We need to learn new ways to teach the kids in our classes to separate signal from noise.

I'm slow to this, but it seems like a new classroom tool I never knew I needed as a publishing space.

Tags: Youtube, classroom, channel

Comments

[Kathy Cassidy]

I find Youtube to be a great tool for displaying my students' learning. Recently I had to upload some material to Teachertube so that students in another school could view it and I found it very cumbersome. I recently discoverd that I can "customize" the videos on Youtube so that other "related" videos do not appear when the video is finished. I love this feature for my six year olds.

[Leif Harboe (Norway)]

Youtube is certainly a very good tool for distributing and sharing "photostories", I used it with my students last year when we cooperated with a Spanish school.
What I learned from that project is that I should have informed the parents about what we where doing and why we were doing it as the students used family photos making digital stories.
Some times after the project period I removed the films.