Video Sharing - A Box of Chocolates
The value of video sharing sites for enriching my student’s classroom experience has remained unclear (and unexplored) up to this week. I have now spent some time on a few of the better known video sharing sites. It has been instructive.I used a simple, but practical scenario as I explored. I am a science teacher, needing resources on structures for my Grade 3 class and planets for my Grade 6s. I will spend a reasonable amount of time searching for video clips.
I started my search at YouTube. A search using fairly specific terms gave me 1 useful video on the relative sizes of planets. The rest of the results were, at best well intentioned, and at worst irrelevant. Looking for clips on bridges or skyscrapers was not successful. I got a sense that any clips I might use were buried in the noise.
TeacherTube was more promising. I found some clips on student bridge building and some lessons on the planets. Nothing showed up on skyscrapers. Google Video gave me higher quality material than YouTube. It was fun. As a teacher, I found it light on content.
School Tube and Blip TV didn’t pan out too well in my little scenario.
So what’s the bottom line? One key fact is that I can easily get awesome videos (supporting our curriculum) from my district’s Media Services at no charge. Another resource that our teachers really love is the Learn Alberta site. It links to some great videos from National Geographic and others. It is very hard for YouTube to compete against this when I'm looking for focused, tight content.
I must remind myself that video sharing is a Web 2.0 service. It exists because of user generated content. And so I come back to the thought that this may best be utilized as a way for students to share their learning or demonstrate the results of a research project. With the needed permissions and proper tagging, posting a video is a nice way to celebrate some of their work. This clip is a collection of excerpts from a video that our Robotics Club made last year. The group created a robot called Georgina, and taught it to find scraps of white paper on the floor.
posted by John Lobe @ 9:37 PM
3 Comments:
Thanks for sharing your clip on creating Georgina in the Robotics club. Students were truly engaged! Making a clip for YouTube is a great way to celebrate.
John,
You made some interesting points about how videosharing can best be used for classrooms. It may not always be possible to find content-rich instructional videos, because of who the creators of are. Video creation is open to "anyone". We apply certain standards and criteria to book selection for our classrooms, and these standards are somewhat more difficult to apply to videos found on videosharing sites.
I think it is certainly valid to suggest that one of the best uses of videosharing is for allowing students to demonstrate their learning.
By the way, your blog looks fantastic!
Ronda
Hey John. Were there any hoops you had to jump through to be able to post your students' images?
Cool robot - where did the name come from?
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