Tech Tips & Timely Tidbits
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Tech Tips and Timely Tidbits by Heather Loy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Thing #20: YouTube
While I’ve been familiar with YouTube and TeacherTube for a while now, I have to admit that I’ve never actually sat down and browsed or searched them before now. In the past I’ve always had a link someone else has provided or searched for a specific video that someone needed or that I knew was already in YouTube.
I have to also admit that the whole YouTube thing scares me a bit – not the how to use/access it, but because of the content. Yes, it has a lot of great original and educational content, but it also has a lot of copyrighted content that I’m sure was never given permission to be uploaded. Which leads me to question if I use those uploaded items in the classroom, am I modeling good behavior? Am I inadvertently giving my kids the notion that it’s okay to violate copyright? Or have I taught them well enough to be responsible users and producers of materials?
Despite these questions, I can’t help but appreciate and get a guilty pleasure out of finding bits of nostalgia from my past such as “One RingyDingy“ I’m going to try to embed the clip, but since YouTube is blocked by my district, teachers, you’re going to have to take a look at it from home. Sorry!
Of course, I wasn’t born when Laugh-In aired, but my Mom (who worked for the phone company) had the album.
Another example of the benefit of YouTube is using it to bridge the generation gap, especially with cultural references. I was talking with some students the other day and we were talking about baseball and for some reason I mentioned Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First” sketch. The kids didn’t know who or what I was talking about, so I pulled up YouTube and, sure enough, I found a bunch of clips of “Who’s On First.” Of couse, I had to play it a few times for some of them to get the humor, and I don’t think they really found it as funny as I do, they were probably humoring me, but at least they know who Abbott and Costello are now!
January 25th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Thanks for the laugh! I loved “Laugh In” and Lily Tomlin as the telephone lady. I didn’t know this was on YouTube but now will have it in my Vodpod.
Side note: YouTube isn’t blocked in your school district?
January 25th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
Yes, YouTube is blocked by my district. I take my Macbook to school and I have an aircard through my cell phone company for Internet access. There are days I never pull it out of my laptop case, and there are days I do most of my work on the Macbook – podcasts, video, create pdf documents, etc. Plus, my schedules are all on iCal sync/consolidation to keep me organized. (Google calendars: drama club, library schedule, mobile laptop labs sign-up schedules; Moodle calendars: school calendar, course calendars, computer lab calendar; and of course my personal calendar) I can’t access my iCal from the district computers and of course, even though I can sync it to my cell phone, cell phones are prohibited! If students can’t have them, we can’t have them out during school hours either!
I don’t feel guilty for bringing and using my Mac, as all the work I do on it is related to my job! It’s not like I’m surfing eBay or playing games all day! Nor, do I blog or do personal tasks on it during my school time. Administration knows I bring and use it and they don’t mind.