Posts
"The next medium, whatever it is - it may be the extension of consciousness - will include television as its content, not as its environment, and will transform television into an art form." (McLuhan, 1962)
Reflections on earning to use the tool.
Marshall McLuhan (born in Edmonton) was visionary in how he viewed the progress of media and how it would transform our world. YouTube from the moment it began, caught the imagination of people who wanted to share their truths with the world. While my own postings to YouTube have been minimal, due to a lack of a good (or bad for that matter) digital video camera, I have been using YouTube and Teacher Tube videos for a few years for instructional purposes. This, of course, has been hampered by district technology folks who don't want students to be able to access inappropriate videos. YouTube was blocked until this school year at my school. As a tool, YouTube is incredibly easy to use as a viewer. Put in a search term and you'll be able to pull up videos on almost any topic imaginable. It's also very easy to post videos to this site. You simply create an account and upload videos after you've determined what level of privacy you wish to maintain for viewing and comments. The site links to all social networks and videos can be uploaded from those sites as well as directly from your personal computer. Channels, which are videos linked by over-arching theme can be subscribed to as RSS feeds.
Personal Use and Learning
For the first year of using YouTube, I was a passive viewer. I surfed a little and watched pop culture mind candy. I can honestly say that I didn't use it for education at all (my own or students'). In the next year, I began to explore YouTube and Teacher Tube (which had been recommended to me as a way of getting around the block put in by techies) for useful education clips. Some were good and very useful, some were hokey and useless. I found myself more frustrated by TeacherTube and didn't use it much, but recommended it to math teachers as most of the useful clips seemed to be aimed at that department. YouTube seemed much better for finding things for Social Studies and English which could be great discussion starters or clips related to readings in those departments. I heard my colleagues more frequently discussing the need for short videos rather than the longger DVD's which made up the bulk of our video collection. The search for a good streaming video service was on!
At this time, I also realized that I needed to learn how to post videos and ran smack into two controversies. The first was the issue of privacy. After posting videos of my darling daughter in her Christmas concert, I was asked to take the video down as it showed other children who were being protected from possibly abusive parents. I simply made the video settings more private so that they could only be shared by me with specific people. The next problem I encountered was copyright around music. I knew that YouTube was getting much more careful about copyright infringement, but I was very surprised (again, at Christmas), when after posting a video of a dance lesson, YouTube posted a link to the performer's iTunes account and gave information about the song. (see below) I was surprised by this because I hadn't considered that posting a video where a tune was used for teaching purposes would constitute a breach of copyright. I had guessed it would be considered "Fair Use."
Because my daughter has Down syndrome, I've had the opportunity to see some pretty horrific posts in public settings about children and adults with Ds. Privacy settings are pretty important to me, so while I may allow a video to be public, I am very careful to disallow comments. I may miss out on the positive comments that could be shared, but I also stop the trolls out there from causing pain for me or my family.
I enjoy my YouTube account and have used it to organize videos for presentations (Anti-Hate Week at my school). I have my favourites and have videos queued for viewing when I have time to watch. I also like that I can RSS certain channels or creators to my Google Reader. I suppose that my next level of usage will be to create instructional videos for sharing or to encourage student creation of class content related videos. Now that things can be viewed without blockage, perhaps we can even create our own school channel!
Video sharing and creation sites are arguably both the most controversial and most useful tool educators and students can use in the learning environment. In 21st century skills: Rethinking how students learn, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey write "We need to change Internet-access policies (as well). Consider the greatest collection of free video content ever created - YouTube - and the fact that it is banned in most schools." This simple issue affects almost every school I know, yet the ability to easily access materials that make both teaching and learning more effective is denied to most of the education community of North America. It can be argued that Teacher Tube allows educators to get around this problem by providing videos that are created for (and by) educators, are ad-free and don't include videos that are inappropriate for the education setting. (Berger & Drexler, 2010.) This is true, but the breadth of the collection on Teacher Tube isn't sufficiently wide enough or of high enough quality to match the value of YouTube, in my opinion. Nor is Teacher Tube as user friendly and intuitive as YouTube. Ultimately, students need to be taught to deal with inappropriate content in the same way that we would hopefully educate them on how to deal with inappropriate content on the web. Richardson's anecdote about the student who came across a web page that was too mature for school, then simply backed up and made note of the page to pass on to the teacher was a model for how we should be teaching basic courtesy and appropriate use at school, rather than simply banning a tool because it may be used incorrectly. (Richardson, 2006.)
The value of sharing and creating video in the education setting is immense. Not only does it support visual learning and literacy, it encourages creative methods of expressing what has been learned. By being able to comment, viewers can encourage each other, question and extend concepts or link to other related videos or ideas.On Sunday, I took my family to visit Adams River, the home of one of the largest sockeye salmon spawning runs in the world. This year's run is estimated to be the largest in 100 years, something that couldn't have been imagined last year when there was fear that the sockeye runs may be in danger of collapse. The video taken yesterday is not only a great jumping off point for discussion in elementary and secondary classes in my province, it becomes a historical document as well. The video was easily taken with a Flip camera (borrowed from my school), and edited using the software that supports a Flip camera. With ease of use like this, movie making becomes something students can easily accomplish as well. Now if they can view what they've created during school time, then learning conversations can truly be enriched.
