Thursday, 21 February 2013

Video in the classroom has come a long way...

It really is insane how far video use in the classroom has come in the past decade. You would think sending a couple students down to the library to pick up a television to watch a Bill Nye VHS is in the past...guess again. As of last year, the school where I was an EA at, still very much used television sets and VHS tapes. It's not a big deal that this is still happening, it's just sad that some teachers aren't taking the time to realize how useful and awesome smartboards can be.

Out with the old and in with the new! YOUTUBE has everything you need, for any subject. You as a teacher can stand and blab about god knows what all day long, and your visual learners will not get anything out of it. You need to keep your students engaged, and there's no better way to do that than a sweet video.
 

TeacherTube is an excellent website for all ages and educational areas. As a big history and geography nut, I took a good look at what this website provided for those areas. The video: http://teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?title=World_Population_Explosion&video_id=189453, I would use this video in a world population unit (gr.7), to give my students a better understanding of where the population is distributed throughout the world. They should also understand what areas are overpopulated now and what areas have always been overpopulated.
 
 
Another one would be: http://teachertube.com/viewVideo.php?video_id=47658 "If the World was a Village of 100 people." What percentage of each of those 100 people would be from each of the continents? (61 Asia) (14 Africa) (11 Europe) (9 South America) (5 North America) (0 Austrailia)...if you wanted to know... Then you could try it with your class, split the students into the continents. It really is a cool site, because a lot of students have made their own educational videos and put them on there and some very creative.
 
I would definitely encourage students to do their own videos, especially with the technology available nowadays, students can be quite creative once they get an idea in there head.
 

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2 comments:

  1. Jennifer Adams21 February 2013 at 12:34

    You are so right Tom, YouTube has an overwhelming amount of really awesome videos that teachers could and should take advantage of in the classroom. However, as we have heard over and over in I4Ed we need to Think Before we use it! In other words, some videos are poorly constructed and others have inaccurate information AND even worse is the BORING videos. So while I do agree with using video's in the classroom, I just suggest that we err on the side of caution as we THINK before use it. For example: How will this video benefit the students? What will the students gain out of this video? Will this video stimulate the student interest? Etc...

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  2. Mrs T21 February 2013 at 12:37

    Great post Tom! I had actually found TeacherTube before and forgot about it when I posted about online videos, thank you for reminding me. Some videos that I showed when I was teaching about population in Grade 10 were the National Geographic 7 Billion people videos. I found them really interesting so I thought I'd share:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4B2xOvKFFz4

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc4HxPxNrZ0

    Thanks for sharing :)
    Miss L
    Miss L’s Whole Brain Teaching

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