Category Archives: Education Technology

YouTube Tips, Tricks, and Guidelines

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Tips, Tricks, and Guidelines

YouTube Guidelines.pdf

With YouTube now unblocked at Charlottesville High School, here’s a quick guide to get you started with using YouTube. If you have any questions about using YouTube (including the ability to embed YouTube videos in Moodle, Prezis, or other websites; create your own YouTube “channel”; subscribe to playlists, etc…) please contact your ITRT.

Guidelines:

(1) Please remember that you signed an AUP and the specifications in that document.

(2) Every click made on the CCS network is stored on the server’s memory.

(3) Please remind students about ethical and appropriate use.

(4) Please remember to preview YouTube material before using the site in a teaching-learning moment. You are our most important and effective firewall for appropriate material on the internet.

(5) Please monitor student use of technology while students are under your supervision. Going to inappropriate places on the internet is not a technology issue, but a student discipline/teacher supervision issue.

- Please be aware of the content of your video, as well as the “related-videos” on the side, and the comments from other users below. There are ways to turn off those features to focus attention on your clip, and avoid questionable content in those other areas. Please see the links below for more on this.

YouTube: Fast Facts

  • In November 2006, YouTube, was bought by Google Inc. for $1.65 billion, and now operates as a subsidiary of Google.
  • In May 2010, it was reported that YouTube was serving more than two billion videos a day, which it described as “nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined.”
  • YouTube says that 24 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and that around three quarters of the material comes from outside the United States.
  • It is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.
  • YouTube is the third most visited website on the Internet, behind Google and Facebook.

*statistics from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube and http://youtube.com

“Safety Mode”

YouTube has a Safety-Mode which helps protect viewers from questionable content. It also helps block related videos and comments that could be inappropriate for the classroom. “An example of this type of content might be a newsworthy video that contains graphic violence such as a political protest or war coverage.”

It’s easy to opt in to Safety Mode: Just click on the link at the bottom of any video page. You can even lock your choice on that browser with your YouTube password.

For more info: http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?&answer=174084

Using YouTube in the Classroom

Video Collections:

If you would like all of this in a 2-page pdf to download and pass on to your teachers and students, please click here.

review or end-of-year project ideas

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I was asked for ideas for technology projects for a couple of social studies classes for end-of-the-year or review projects before the SOLs. Here’s a few possibilities that may be helpful for teachers. The first three are ones that I’ve worked with a lot recently and have had very positive reaction from students and teachers. At the end are links to more web tools for student projects.

1. Glogster Glogster.com picture

Glogster lets students create a multi-media “poster” that can include images, text, url links, audio and video. Students can add images they find on the web, add a text summary of a unit, or record their own audio narration to go with their poster here are couple of examples:

Here’s a glog on air pollution:

A student’s glog on the Revolutionary War. It shows how images, text boxes, and video clips can be used in a glog.

A “glog” on learning to use Glogster. It includes a nice video of Glogster in a high school science classroom.

Here’s a 15-minute video on creating glogs with students that shows each step from adding images to publishing the glog:

Glogster has free edu accounts that allow teachers to sign up and then invite up to 100 students. Having students create review “glogs” before the exams would allow other students to quickly browse and see videos, images, and key review terms for each topic from the school year. You can use arrows and symbols to show a timeline or cause and effect. In the end, glogster is basically a web2.0 version of your basic “poster” project, but now it can include audio, video, and links to other informative sites.

2. Prezi

Here’s my post on Prezi. Prezi is a zooming presentation tool that allows you to create non-linear presentations. Basically, it’s one big page that can include images, text, video, links, and attached files (pdf, ppts, etc). Prezi then can zoom and jump from item to item on the path that you set, or viewers can move around the prezi as they like.

Here’s a great example from a middle school history teacher on the Arab-Israeli conflict. It’s a great use of a timeline with text and images and movement to capture the viewers interest.

The Arab Israeli Conflict on Prezi

Prezi offers free edu accounts to teachers and students. Select the “Edu Enjoy” account type to create your free Prezi acount. It allows you to set your prezis (or your students’ prezis) as “Private” and provides 500mb of storage to host your prezis online.

3. Animoto

Animoto is a very quick way to create online videos. You can upload photos, images, videos, text, and music and Animoto mixes it all into a 30-second video. Students could pick a review topic or important term and pick a handful of pictures and annotation to go with it and have a video created in under 5 minutes.

Here’s an example that I just created (it literally took less than 2 mintues) with images, video, and music that Animoto already has loaded on their site. To use as a review, I think using more text would be useful, but I just grabbed 10 images and video clips of world travel and set it to some classical music:

Animoto also has educator accounts that allow you to create longer videos and remove the animoto logo from your videos.

On Blocking Websites…

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Here’s one school system’s take on using their web filter:

What we’ve decided is that we will no longer use the web filter as a classroom management tool. Blocking one distraction doesn’t solve the problem of students off task – it just encourages them to find another site to distract them. Students off task is not a technology problem – it’s a behavior problem. It is our intention that we help students to learn the appropriate on-task behaviors instead of assuming that we can use filters to manage student use.

via » Would You Please Block? Bud the Teacher.