Teaching for the Future: May 2008

Thursday, May 15, 2008

TftF 94: YouTube in the Classroom (pt. 4) Suggested Viewing

For the last few episodes we have been discussing YouTube in theory, almost at a distance. I have even read some comments on blogs like 7 Inch Cinema saying that I'm being a little abstract. To fix this, today we are going to be looking at some YouTube videos for kids.

I will admit that YouTube was definitely not designed for kids and teachers. I know that YouTube filters content, but often I find that I'm too young for the videos. Despite all that, today we're going to get a little deeper and we're going to be looking at a few specific videos. In this episode we go over some recommended videos.

Before we get into that I continue the Better Know A Listener series with an interview with Aaron "The Art Guy" Smith. Aaron is the edu-blogger/podcaster behind on of my favorite sights, The Academic Aesthetic.com. If you are interested in technology education and/or art education you can find interesting information and web tools from Aaron.

Though this is the end of our current series about YouTube, we will continue to compile a list of recommended videos. If you have a favorite YouTube video for kids and teens, leave a link to the video and your site so that I can give you credit.

Suggested Viewing
Chocolate Rain (Played during the intro)

Digital Ethnography

TeacherTube on YouTube

Cry Me a Verb

TeacherTube - 50 States and Capitals cartoon song

Did You Know 2.0 (Thanks Aarron)

Signing Time
Thanks Made Loud & Freya's Mom Casey

Silent Miaow aka Amanda Baggs
see her blog at http://ballastexistenz.autistics.org/

Links
7 Inch Cinema

Vid to Mp3

Teacher Tube

Stumble It!

Posted by Dave LaMorte at 5/15/2008 06:34:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

Sunday, May 04, 2008

TftF 93: YouTube in the Classroom (pt. 3) with Dr. Scott McLeod

Click To Play

In this episode I interview Dr. Scott McLeod. Scott is the coordinator of the Educational Administration program at Iowa State University and director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE). You may be more familiar with Scott's work on his blog, DangerouslyIrrelevant.org, where he discusses education and technology from the perspective of administrators and teachers.

Though it seems like I have been spending a lot of time defending YouTube, I want to make it clear that video sharing sites are not all butterflies and rainbows. YouTube has greatly effected the way interpret and interact with the media. Just think of the recent controversies in national politics. In an article in the Hartford Currant, aptly entitled "YouTube, A Blessing and a Curse". The author discusses how the permanence and the availability of video news, gives certain videos an impact they would not have had earlier. Just think of McCain's "Bomb Iran", Clinton's sniper fire, and the controversy surrounding Jeremiah Wright. How would things change if video coverage and the videos themselves were not available on demand 24 hours a day. "In past years, controversy... might have lasted a day or two before people lost interest." (Weir)

This 'on demand effect' isn't limited to the presidential campaign. What if you applied this to classroom management? More specifically issues like behavior and cheating. With little or no effort it is easy to find a ton of instructional video on how to cheat on tests and game the system. Over at his blog, Learning in Hand, Tony Vincent collected many of these interesting videos. What happens when kids have access to material that allows them to game the test and cheat their way through class? While these videos are concerning I am more interested in what I found on Scott MeLeod's Dangerously irrelevant. In this post Scott has collected videos by students taken with their mobile phones. These videos show scenes of teacher/student confrontations in class. One one hand these are an invasive look at a few bad moments in what are probably good classrooms, while on the other hand these videos could be student-citizen journalism exposing the abuses teachers. To try to make sense of all of this I brought Scott McLeod on the show to talk about his post and the changing role of YouTube in the Classroom.

LINKS:
YouTube A Blessing and a Curse By William Weir
http://www.courant.com/features/lifestyle/hc-youtubepolitics.artapr06,0,4268424.story

How to Cheat
http://learninginhand.com/blog/2008/04/how-to-cheat.html

How can I cheat on the test? Let me count the ways…
http://www.teach42.com/2008/04/02/how-can-i-cheat-on-the-test-let-me-count-the-ways/

Cell phone cameras in the K-12 classroom: Punishable offenses or student-citizen journalism?
http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/2008/03/cell-phone-came.html

Labels: dangerously irrelevant, ipod, learning in hand, teaching, teaching for the future, technology, video, video sharing, youtube