Teachertube - An interesting resource!

This morning I have had the opportunity to explore Teachertube, and I was quite impressed by what I saw. I like the idea that I don't have to wade through all of the videosharing files on Youtube to find something relevant and appropriate for my Social Studies or English classroom.

To begin my exploration, I decided to do a search on the French revolution, as that is what we will be studying in the coming weeks in S.S. 9. So I started by looking at the options on Youtube, and found many of the videos contained inappropriate content, and were more of a satire of the revolution, but there was The French Revolution Rap - JC which appears to be a presentation created by a student for a teacher or class. I thought it was quite a clever video, and although some of it is difficult to understand, I might consider showing it to my class just for fun. I then went to Teachertube and found a few listings for the French revolution - many of which were obviously student produced projects for a teacher: Reign of Terror & Jack and Jill - French Revolution . Up to this point, I had only thought of videosharing sites as an option for me to present videos to students about certain topics, but clearly I was not thinking about how students could use it to submit a project to me! This seems like a great way of using videosharing, and the possibilities are endless.

I thought about what students would have to do, or have access to, in order to be able to do this, and it seems likely that many would have the means at home. The only stumbling block that I encountered was that in order for students to sign up to upload videos to Teachertube, they must be at least 18 years old, whereas on Youtube students only need to be 13 years old. I can understand the age limit of 13, as I would think that there numerous legal issues for schools surrounding the posting of student videos. However, I don't quite understand the age limit of 18 on Teachertube. As an educator, I would prefer that if my students were to upload a video in order to share it with other students and teachers, they be allowed to use Teachertube because I think it might be a "safer" environment with more purposeful viewers.

I spent some time exploring Teachertube for personal interest, and found Did You Know?2.0 and Pay Attention (I notice that someone in class already posted this on the interesting weblinks in WebCT) videos which could be used as clip for a staff meeting or department meeting to lead into a discussion about using technology in the classroom. These clips could be quite effective in that they are not too long, and provide fascinating pieces of information. Further to this, I was surprised to find an interesting video clip called Do We Really Need Teacher-Librarians? I was fortunate enough to stumble across this in the Groups section under EDES 501 - I guess that's us!