Tuesday, October 11, 2011

YouTube.com/Teachers Helps Innovative Educators Transform Learning


Schools that have moved from banning and blocking to safely embracing tools like YouTube are able to empower their students to learn with real-world resources.  If you’re like middle school history teacher James Sanders, you may be using YouTube to spark discussions, energize and excite students about various topics, increase instructional time by flipping the classroom, and create playlists for each lesson so students can dive deeper into specific areas that interest them.

Now YouTube.com is taking a more active role in supporting learning. They started last summer with The YouTube Teacher’s Studio. This is a workshop that brought teachers from around the world together to get smart about using YouTube in the classroom. Topics included “Finding your inner Spielberg,” “FlipTeaching,” and Using YouTube as a powerful educational tool. From there, YouTube took these workshops as a springboard to launch a new site called YouTube.com/Teachers.
The site is a resource for educators everywhere to learn how to use YouTube as an educational tool. There are lesson plan suggestions, highlights of great educational content on YouTube, and training on how to film your own educational videos. The site was written by teachers for teachers, and YouTube wants to continue that spirit of community-involvement. To that end, they are creating a new YouTube newsletter for teachers (sign up here!). They are also asking teachers to submit their favorite YouTube playlists for highlight on YouTube EDU where there is rich video content organized by content area.


If YouTube has yet to help you update your teaching practice, YouTube.com/Teachers provides ten ideas for inspiration.
  1. Spark Lively Discussions
  2. Organize all the great video content you find
  3. Archive your work
  4. Allow students to dig deeper into a subject
  5. Get struggling students up to speed, and push strong students ahead
  6. Review for upcoming exams
  7. Create a YouTube center in your classroom
  8. Create quizzes to accompany videos for instant feedback
  9. Create Interactive Video Quests
  10. Flip your classroom
For schools that block YouTube, they are working on that too with a pilot a program with schools that will redirect all YouTube links to educational content on YouTube.com/education. In addition, comments can be disabled and related videos will only be educational. This addresses two concerns in schools today.  Schools interested in participating in the pilot program can sign up at YouTube.com/t/education.

1 comment:

  1. I completely agree with this article in that YouTube is a wonderful learning tool to add into the classroom. I use YouTube at least a few times per month along with other sites that I stream videos in from. YouTube provides a different element to the school day, it breaks up the teacher talking student listening and brings in the enjoyment of multimedia that the students are very familiar with and enjoy very much. I use YouTube a lot in Language Arts with my second graders and I love using it to spark conversations. I also look up math videos like school house rocks and show them to my class. I enjoy the large array of choices and the ability to embed videos into my work for my students to access specific videos only.

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