YouTube in the K-12 Classroom
By Alix E. Peshette
The explosion of video available on the web has been astounding. It's also been both tantalizing and frustrating for K-12 teachers. The tantalizing part is the presence of really good educational resources showing up on YouTube and other video locations such as the National Science Foundation and NASA websites. As an ex-world history teacher, I got chills when I saw this wonderful Bayeux Tapestry animation on YouTube – what an incredible way to bring a piece of history alive!
The frustrating part is this:
I’ve been pondering this issue, reading the hacking blogs and playing with software solutions. Being a member of the educational community, one naturally turns to Open-Source and freeware for solutions. As a Technology Training Specialist, I also look for solutions that aren’t beyond the comfort level of the novice-techie teacher. So, here is what I've found and tested, with many thanks to various blogs.
Download those Videos!
Those videos are web-embedded and viewed in a web browser. The browser for this job is Mozilla FireFox! Internet Explorer isn’t set up to recognize the very long URL’s of embedded video. In addition, IE doesn’t have the plethora of add-ons and plug-ins that are available for FireFox. There are a variety of “video download” add-ons and everyone seems to have their favorites: VideoDownloader, Amazing Media Browser and Vixy.net. among others. I’ve had varying degrees of success with them and most of them flunk my “anyone can do it” test. The one download tool that has performed consistently and easily is UnPlug.
Go to a YouTube page that has a video and click the UnPlug icon on the toolbar. UnPlug obligingly opens a new page with a list of the videos it has found embedded in the previous web page. It even states: Type: Flash Video Data (this is probably the one you want) Save. Can’t get much easier than that!
Show those Videos!
As noted above, YouTube videos are Flash video and it takes a special media player to show them. Enter the Open-Source Democracy Player! This gem of a media player (gotta love the name) states: “Play virtually any video-- Quicktime, WMV, MPEG, AVI, XVID, and more.” It does just what it says. Easy, reliable, simple; so comforting!
So, now anyone can access video from YouTube and other sources, download them to the local hardrive and show them in the classroom, even when the Internet is down! Ready to go visit some awesome collections of video? Take a look and keep in mind the fair use and copyright guidelines. Power to the people!
National Science Foundation Multimedia Gallery
NASA Multimedia Gallery
Edison National Historic Site
The National Archives Video Sections
2 comments:
Excellent Post! I will be sharing this with staff. Thanks!
V
Hi Alix. I followed a link on Larry's site and found your blog.
I'm going to try this idea of yours. You're right about schools blocking YouTube and teachers wanting videos on demand. BTW, the Edison article about Black Maria is fascinating.
We have interactive whiteboards in our ESL classrooms, so videos show well. I teach adults, so they aren't as responsive to movies as the kids are. I usually have to be sure to have an assignment based on the material or they tend to want to leave early. This might not be a problem since YouTube presentations tend to be short.
Christina Niven
Post a Comment