Classroom YouTube (TeacherTube) Channel

Many teachers are beginning to use digital storytelling as a method to engage students with course content. Multimedia tools such as PhotoStory and MovieMaker are accessible to anyone using Windows XP... best of all, they are free! Students often enjoy using multimedia technology because it allows them to communicate their message beyond text; their stories incorporate pictures, video, narration, and music.

Students are also motivated by the number of people who will view their product. If it is only turned into the teacher, quality may suffer. Teachers use this to their advantage in a number of ways. The ideas below list ways teachers are displaying students' digital storytelling videos...

• Submitted to the teacher only
• Class viewing of all videos
• Burn stories to CD or DVD as a "video study guide"
• Submit videos to cable access channel
• Upload videos to a YouTube channel

YouTube? For school? The AP History classes create digital stories on a variety of topics. They use each other's videos to create "video study guides" as a way to prepare for the AP exam. They have experimented with a variety of delivery methods... burning the stories to CDs... they have tried DVDs... most recently, YouTube. A teacher can easily create a YouTube account, upload all of the student created videos, and publish to the web. Videos can be viewed from any computer connected to the Internet by students and the rest of the world! That can be very motivating.

It is important to remember that a student's personal information should not be attached to any project posted on the Internet without specific parent permission. This includes names, pictures, addresses, telephone numbers, etc. Take a look at the AP History Channel; contact me if you have an idea for using YouTube with your class.

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Important update... Well, about 48 hours after I wrote the above article, YouTube was added to our list of blocked websites. As I've mentioned in previous articles about YouTube, it does contain some inappropriate material. Fortunately, there is a more appropriate alternative... TeacherTube. I am still researching to see if a "channel" can be created by individual users, but all content is monitored by the education community. Tools are available to "flag" material that may be inappropriate (or no relevance to education). Click the link and check it out today.