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]
danmcdowell.net 
Thank you for posting the video describing your Children of the Holocaust webquest. The power of the images and sound files from sites like the USHMM site are incredibly engaging. Posting the link to your webquest is appreciated–you’ve created a meaningful project that fellow teachers will want to utilize. The TeacherTube team appreciates your encouragement for teachers to participate in the community to make it a better resource.
Check out the TeacherTube blog at teachertube.blogspot.com and let us know if you have ideas about how to make the site better for teaching and learning.
Jodie
jodie@teachertube.com
http://www.teachertube.com
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What a great idea! Today a student introduced me to brainpop.com. I love online tools!
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Thanks for this! I was a bit frustrated today when a presentation a student had done and uploaded to YouTube was blocked by the school network. Hopefully this will get round that problem (although Google Video, bizarrely, isn’t blocked at our place…)
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Great post!
I’m with you on reluctance to leave YouTube for its niche cousins. I’ll feel more confident posting to niche video sites when Google Video begins indexing them.
A multi-upload tool would be useful: I’d like to have the option to upload to TeacherTube and syndicate it over to YouTube. Now that would be handy.
I enjoy the blog; thanks for writing.
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