I think YouTube is a great site to find all kinds of interesting things and kids love it. It is blocked in my district and I support that for students because they would waste lots of time on inappropriate or irrelevant stuff. I do with that they would give teachers access though. It has been explained to me as a bandwidth problem when I ask.
I have found TeacherTube to be a great alternative to YouTube, but I am not sure if it is blocked??? My favorite videos are raps and songs that teachers have made to teach content: Mrs. Burk's Perimeter Rap and 9 Time Table Hip Hop for example. I think kids could learn from these and it would be a great project for students to make their own raps.
I also like this student commercial about what you post on line. It is short, but powerful. I really hope this is not blocked at school. I also found that the Common Craft "In Plain English" videos that we have been using are on TeacherTube.
I know that SchoolTube is not blocked but it did not seem to have as good of resources. I like the videos on TED as far as quality and information, but again they are blocked at school :(
So... why do you think so much of this video content is blocked at your school? Have you ever heard from the IT dept or Curriculum folks as to the reasons?
ReplyDeleteAs I mentioned whenever I ask about things being blocked they say that if too many people run video that it will crash because they do not have enough bandwidth.
ReplyDeleteMy goal the next nine weeks is to run a paperless class with one class as a pilot. Then I will run all of my classes this way. I then will argue that the district move in this direction by buying technology instead of textbooks and paper. It is a long term, ambitious goal, but we have to start somewhere.