YouTube...TeacherTube...Video in Education

[As posted on educatorslog.in]

In the process of checking out Varni's video link on YouTube for "School Chale Hum", I also found a link to the "Ek Chidiya" film which I posted as a resource just now.

It got me thinking about the use of YouTube as such an easily accessible resource for the classroom. I'm sure there are a lot of useful video clips already up on YouTube - we have posted some ourselves and shared some others here whenever we've discovered them.

A little bit of "googling" on "youtube in education" led me to "TeacherTube" - a site dedicated to YouTube-like sharing of videos that are all entirely aimed for use in education! Here's what I got on them from their site --

"After beta testing for almost two months, TeacherTube officially launched on March 6, 2007. Our goal is to provide an online community for sharing instructional videos. We seek to fill a need for a more educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners. It is a site to provide anytime, anywhere professional development with teachers teaching teachers. As well, it is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a concept or skill."

Videos are a powerful medium for teaching and they don't not need much investment on the part of schools. The barriers, I think, have been the lack of good films for use in the classroom - especially in India. In the US and other Western countries there is a huge repository of good educational videos produced by National Geographic, PBS (Nova series) and others. Schools use them on a routine basis. These are not so easily accessible in India and are pretty expensive too, for use in India.

With YouTube and TeacherTube (and even Google Video where you can put up longer films) now, one does not need much to use videos in teaching - a teacher does not even need a separate video/cd/dvd player - all one needs is access to the Internet - which schools should certainly look into investing in, if they have not already...and not just for use in the principal's office, but in teacher staff rooms, special A/V screening rooms, student computer labs, and even classrooms, as well.