When broached about the topic of YouTube and its uses in the classroom, I sometimes cringe at the name and suppose that YouTube should belong to the same category as Wikipedia – an informational hub that can sometimes carry a tarnished reputation due to its boundless and editable data. Preferring scholarly documentaries and journals to potentially opined ideas on websites, YouTube used to be a website of – agad! – fear and loathsomeness. That is, until I attended some YouTube Media Curation meetings with the CEFL team and, the Media Curation UO Conference presentation by my fellow podmate and online teacher extraordinaire, Jennefer Rousseau.
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| Jennefer Rousseau (source) |
Jennefer’s presentation took us on a journey through technology. She began by discussing her own voyage using YouTube in the classroom – back when it was in its infancy. Jennefer demonstrated through an engaging PowerPoint how her roots in YouTube began as (and what her students must have thought also) an imaginative teacher engaging her students in a language that they could really relate to: technology. Shakespeare and sports?! On video? Fantastic!
What the presentation really hit home for me was the fact that student engagement is driven up when using a visual that they can understand and, more importantly, relate to. No more need for lengthy and scholarly documentaries, conducting basic searches in YouTube will yield many suitable choices for even the pickiest of teachers provided he or she has the basic principles in mind: condensed length, visually-appealing design, and audience and curricularly-appropriate content.
Jennefer challenged her participants to view several YouTube clips that ranged from the, uh, ordinary to the awe-inspiring. I left the session feeling like I had a new repertoire of resources at my awaiting fingertips, and I was eager to see what other great, concise video clips were out there. My search has yielded a multitude of beneficial resources and now my problem is not how to find the latest and greatest, but where to store all these juicy videos!
Move over, BBC, here comes YouTube!
To view the presentation, click on the following link: UO Conference - Media Curation.
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