Thing #20: YouTube, TeacherTube and Zamzar

Thing #20 has opened a whole new realm of possibilities for me. I'm not sure why I have not used YouTube or TeacherTube. Maybe because YouTube is blocked at school, or maybe I just didn't realize the potential those two sites have. Again, I spent way too much time just looking around and watching "just one more video." My learning curve has dramatically increased this summer with this "thing" and all the others up to this point. The wide variety of movies available on these sites makes their potential for usefulness huge. I found something on every subject I searched. No teacher can use the excuse that they can't find anything relevant to their subject here. These online video sites compare favorably with Discovery Education and other subscription databases for streaming video.

Obvious ways that teachers will find these sites useful are as teaching tools, for reviews, for emphasizing parts of a lesson, for reteaching, as a quick focus on particular areas of study, and more. Students might use them also to review, or to embed into presentations for assignments.

One of the videos I chose to embed into this post is from TeacherTube, and focuses on the themes in To Kill a Mockingbird:



I also decided to include a video I found on YouTube called The Librarian Song. It is just for fun and has no relevance to education, other than for motivation or inspiration:



BTW, I had a little trouble embedding these into my blog post, so I went to TeacherTube for a tutorial on embedding videos into Blogger!