Thing #18: Youtube & Me

Oh, YouTube. I remember when you were THE place to be on a Thursday night in middle school. I just couldn't get enough music videos. Now, horrifyingly enough, I'm actually in several YouTube videos and I'm using it to search for educational tools.

The first video I'm embedding is one that's almost a cheat. I used it in class last year, and it's definitely one of the lessons that my chillins really got into...though I'm not sure if it's because they liked the video or they just wanted me to show them more often, so they faked enthusiasm. Their assignment (the purpose of the lesson was to improve their following directions skills as well as provide them with background for an upcoming story we were reading) for this video was to listen and find the countries that had either changed names or were no longer countries and then do their own version with the song corrected.

I actually DID find, during my explorations today, the same video in Spanish. Granted, I need to do some thinking on how this would be best used with my newcomers, but still...it's pretty fun.

For the next year, I'm planning on using YouTube and its relatives much more, now that I'll have a fully functioning computer hooked up to my projector. One of the videos I'd like to use (in the same fashion as the previous) is embedded below. One of the hurdles I crossed this year was trying to teach students how to use photos to provide context for vocabulary words, so I think I'll use this for a rotation while we're doing stations to practice defining words based solely on picture messages.

I'll briefly mention TeacherTube, only to say that I wish this were somehow a better tool for us. When I first heard of it last year, I was psyched. Then, as I started exploring, I quickly found that there's a much larger range of educational videos on the original YouTube itself, especially when we're talking about videos that our kiddos will actually be interested in watching. However, I did manage to find the following video:

My kids love a challenge, and the best way to get them to do something they don't want to do is to show them people who HAVE done it and challenge them to do it better. So there actually is some great content on TeacherTube, but I think I'll stick to YouTube for now, annoying password-required viewing and all.