By far the greatest difference in my teaching this year as compared to 5 years ago when I left the classroom as a TSA was the impact and use of YouTube videos (pedagogically speaking). There was rarely a day that I did not use some type of visual component to my lessons or search YouTube sites to find additional links and info for my students. I was absolutely blown away by the additional resources available and cannot think of a time when I did not find something useful (along with lots of un-useful somethings as well :-)
I set up a blog precisely for videos early in the year because I found out that my students could not access YouTube at school and I wanted them to use some of what I had found. Embedding video I have discovered is quite easy to do and I actually feel better knowing that my 6th graders are only going to see what I had intended and not the kazilions of other videos that show up as a sidebar. It is also much safer to have them embedded on a safe site for viewing at home as well. I plan to fully develop this blog site next year and add to the videos already there.
And that brings me to another point that I have been pondering: How do we teach kids to be responsible users of technology and the internet and YouTube in particular? It is an amazing resource but is also full of material that is unsuitable for kids with just a click. Putting controls on sites is one thing but responsible, ethical use is another.
I love the archive site (archive.org) and want to create more (and let my students create more) presentations to share this year using clips, video and music. The site was easy to navigate via the search engine and I found lots of interesting videos but did not play around yet with creating. Another "to do" for this year. Luckily I am bookmarking all of these wonderful sites on my Delicious site!
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