I had planned to make this a regular feature on this blog, in part to get me to write more often. Hasn’t really worked out. I seemed to have just forgotten how tough having an infant is.
Anyway, while I haven’t been writing, I haven’t stopped reading. Yesterday, Vicki Davis – the educational wiki queen (and I do mean that as a complement!), wrote about a new tool called TeacherTube. Essentially, it is YouTube for teachers. It has a similar look and feel, has a similar interface for uploading, and a similar method to embed videos on other pages. The big difference – this site is dedicated to educational videos. It appears that non-educational videos that are “flagged” will be removed. I do wonder if that will become difficult to track, will we see “video spammers” try and jam up the service?
I know that many people have mixed feelings about TeacherTube in a YouTube world. If we only place educational videos (both teacher and student produced) on TeacherTube we essentially remove them from the mainstream that YouTube has become. However, YouTube is blocked at my school. I can’t use it in my classroom, nor can I publish videos from my computer at school. As an educational resource, YouTube is limited to what I do at home – where I can download videos and then bring them into school (I talked about this here a couple months ago).
Teachers definitely need to try it out. Create, upload. The only way to really increase the value of this resource is for all of us to contribute to it. Here is my first upload… a video describing my Children of the Holocaust WebQuest. Projects I should be grading right now instead of writing.
[tags]web2.0,youtube,teachertube,video,education2.0[/tags]
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