07.31.08
Thing 19 – I Tube, You Tube, We All Scream for YouTube
I’ve never really spent much time experimenting with YouTube simply because I found it to be busy and potentially inappropriate. I felt uncomfortable with the way the homepage displayed “featured videos” that oftentimes included offensive material or material unsuitable for young students. Now that I have created a YouTube account, I have been able to customize my own homepage that allowed me to remove the YouTube featured content. Unfortunately I haven’t yet been able to remove the one, final “promoted video” from my homepage because it seems like content that has been paid for. Any thoughts on how I might remove that one too?
The “advanced” search button on YouTube allowed me to filter my search so that unsuitable content was not delivered to me, and I was able to locate a video (see below) that taught me how to preserve the last remaining hydrangeas that are blooming in my yard right now. Useful video is not difficult to find through YouTube, and several times I found the list of “related videos” to be useful for expanding my search. As I watched various videos in search of the best ones for classroom and personal use, it became clear that if my students or I were to create and upload our own videos to YouTube we would need to use a microphone that produced high quality sound. It’s frustrating when you just can’t hear what is being said!
I also really liked learning more about TeacherTube, and once again I created a personalized account for this resource. My favorite feature of TeacherTube was the “Channels” tab. Under the channels tab, I was able to grab an rss feed for six different content areas, from math to history. I then added the feeds to a new Pageflakes page and then made the page public. Now I can check my Pageflakes account for video content applicable to my classroom teaching.
