Sunday, July 20, 2008

Week 9, Thing #20: Teacher Tube



I hope that I have embedded a TeacherTube video about banned books in this post. I chose a banned books video because I am interested in the subject and enjoy talking to students about censorship and banned books each year.
Since YouTube is blocked from our school district, I had never bothered to look at it. For this class, I did spend some time with YouTube and I have been happy and disappointed at the videos I have found. There are many useful videos on a variety of school subjects (and lots of tutorials), but there are also a lot of useless and violent things like girl fights. I have learned that YouTube has an incredible number of music videos and concerts--in fact, I have been unable to think of a group that is not listed in YouTube.
I set up a TeacherTube account and selected a couple of videos to add to my "Favorites". I was sorry to see that I could not post directly to my Blogger account, from TeacherTube, but it should be fairly simple to embed the video. I will find out in a minute.
I looked at all of the suggested videos on the RAW page, and then spent more time than I meant to looking at topics of interest to me. The buffering times were slow for most of my videos (Sunday a.m.). Many of the TeacherTube videos are by students or classes and that should make our students more attentive.
I emailed a good video on the periodic table to one of our Science teachers, and I expect to send more videos to teachers when the school year starts.
The "related videos and tags" button is useful and led me to some good information.
I also spent some time with Jumpcut, although I did not sign up for an account. I hope to try it later.
I have also tried to download a video from TeacherTube and convert it using Zamzar. I am currently waiting for an email from them telling me that my video has been converted from the flv format.
I cetainly see TeacherTube as a good source for video on a variety of school related topics.

3 comments:

Ann said...

Teacher Tube has fast become one of my first stops to look for instructions for various programs and processes. Many of the instructional videos are clear and simple to follow and most importantly, things our kids could easily do.

Ann

Robin Turk said...

Like your inclusion of the Banned Books video. I have similar experiences with Utube - some of the education related clips are posted on both sites.

Our district blocks Utube, but we have managed to convince them that TeacherTube is OK. So, as you said, we can use this too to find and send resources to teachers. Sometimes it just takes a little push to get teachers and students to jump in.

I'd be interested to know how your zamzar conversion works. Always better to have a download to use at at school then to keep streaming!

Robin Turk said...

Sorry, the last post was not AkASL-- my identity was confused- I tried to change it but alter personalities can be stubborn.