During the last few weeks, I have been playing around with YouTube.  I learned how to post some short videos there and then connect them to my blog.  I posted some songs from a couple of school concerts and some scenes from our recent school musical.  I received some positive feedback from parents and staff regarding this, and I was pretty impressed with the ability to publish student performances this way.  However, there has been something lurking in the back of my mind regarding the use of YouTube for these types of activities.  I realized that clicking on the YouTube screen in my blog post sends a person directly to the YouTube site where there is unlimited access to any and all of the videos
saved there.

      Although I personally have no problem with anything other people choose to post on YouTube, I am uncomfortable sending other people’s children there via my blog.  I have since been wondering if using YouTube in this manner is inappropriate for my blog, and this depressed me because I love the idea of being able to post school-related videos for students, parents, and relatives to view.

     This all changed last night when I was snooping around on David Warlick’s “2 Cents Worth” Blog.  David wrote a post about the video Vicki Davis created on a new (well, new to me) site called TeacherTube.  And, what a creative video this is!  You must check this out!   Anyway, what excited me even more was what I saw on TeacherTube.

     This site is similar to YouTube, but it is designed for educators to post school-related videos.  As I surfed around on TeacherTube, it appeared to me as if they have kept their pledge to keep the site safe.  Within five minutes of searching the site, I found videos on the following topics:
•    A teacher teaching a math lesson;
•    A teacher discussing how she uses literature circles in her classroom;
•    A student-created science experiment;
•    An explanation of how Germany and Austria-Hungary lost territory after     WWI including a map of Europe; and
•    Student-created animation.

     I hope more educators discover TeacherTube, and I hope it is successful.  I have been thinking about how we could use this with elementary school students.  Just off the top of my head, I can envision teachers posting videos of important lessons as a reference for students and parents when they are working on homework.  How about a student created video of appropriate playground behavior or how to handle conflict on the playground?  Kids love to act.  I’ll bet they could write and act out scenarios like these for their peers to watch.  Parents love to watch their children perform.  This is a much safer site to post concerts for parents and relatives to view.  Students love to write and act out skits (even skits that are connected to the curriculum).  How motivating would it be if they could videotape their skits and safely post the videos on the internet?

     There are a lot more creative people out there than I am.  Does anyone have any other ideas about ways to use TeacherTube in the classroom? 

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Here is Vicki Davis's Video: