YouTube for Schools Opens Resources Up to the Classroom

You're sitting at home, planning a lesson when suddenly you come across the most incredible video to supplement what you are trying to convey. Unfortunately, YouTube is blocked in your school and this is not option. I have encountered this situation numerous times or when I am in the classroom working with students and a question comes up that would be perfectly illustrated with a video.

It's a shame that so much great content is blocked. The justification makes sense, students might get distracted and some of the content online might be inappropriate. Thankfully YouTube has developed a way that we can have the best of both worlds. With YouTube for Schools, it is now possible for schools to unblock and access the large amount of content on YouTubeEdu safely as potentially offensive related videos and comments are disabled.

I am so honored to have worked with the YouTube team on this project. I knew it would make a huge difference in student's opportunities to learn from all of the excellent quality out there.

One great feature of YouTube for Schools are the hundreds of teacher curated videos aleady aligned with the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and Mathematics. For Science the National Science Education Standards were used and for History/Social Studies the videos were aligned to the California State Standards. Now you can easily find videos to supplement whatever you are working on.

With all of the great content available on YouTube, you would think all of the best videos have already been uploaded right? Think again. Every one of you has a great video, lesson, experiment, project, story to share and now you can.

Here is my favorite part: schools can add their own videos to their personal unblocked playlists. If you would like to suggest your own playlist to add to YouTube for Schools, submit it to YouTube.com/Teachers where you can see all the playlists without a login.

With this new tool to support student learning, some examples of how you could use videos in the classroom are:
1) Show a visual representation of a concept after a lesson.
2) Record an important lecture or activity so students can review it later (especially if they were absent).
3) Create a video for when you are absent to help the students and substitute know what to do.
4) Flip your classroom.

The last one, is really exciting. Upload a video and ask students to watch it at home. Then when they come to class, your time is free to go deeper into the subject, do an experiment or project, and all of the other things you wished you could do if you had more time.

Don't stop there, use the tools on the web to support your students and have them support each other.

• With Google+ Hangouts, your students could form a study group and watch the video together to discuss.
• Have students add comments to a Google Spreadsheet that can be reviewed the next day (example), its really easy to make a column filled with times.
• Type 0:00:00 into Cell A2 and 0:00:01 in Cell A3 (or 0:00:05 to skip by 5 seconds, etc).
• Highlight both cells then grab-and-drag the blue box in the corner.

• Use Google Moderator to take questions just like the president.
• Another option is to use a Google Form and collect data that way.

However you do it, now students have a way to give specific feedback at their leisure (not constrained to class schedule or intimidated by peer pressure). You can refine the video if it was confusing to a lot of students and explain it better the next day in class. This kind of feedback might be difficult to obtain in class but now you have a way to assess student's learning and understanding as often as you would like.

YouTube for Schools opens your classroom up to the resources of the world. Teachers are empowered to supplement their lessons as well as share the amazing things they do with everyone.

Original Link from YouTube Blog - Opening Up a World of Educational Content with YouTube for Schools.

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Creating Video Tutorials for your Class Part 2

Video tutorials are an incredible technology, but like any technology their power is only manifested in how they are used. I can only offer my own suggestions because every environment is different and like anything else you will need to adapt video tutorials to your needs and your students' resources.

After you have created your videos, you have a few options depending on your school's IT policy and your student populations' access to technology:

1. Upload the videos to YouTube. This is best if your students have wide access to YouTube either through phones, home or school use. This will prevent you from having to convert the videos or have a place to host them.
   
   
2. Share the videos through a Google site. Assuming this is your class site, you can add notes and other information to help your students.
3. Email the videos or place them on a cd/flash drive. If you wish to do this then I would encourage you to convert them to a smaller file type like an FLV. The software I recommend for doing this is WinFF as it is free and versatile. I will do a more in depth tutorial on WinFF in the next post but for now all you need to know for now is:
1. Install and then open WinFF
2. Click "Add"
3. Click on the "Convert to " drop-down menu and choose "Websites"
4. Then on the "device preset" drop-down menu choose "FLV for fullscreen"
5. Note the output folder and change it if you would like.
6. Click convert
4. If your students do not have the option to watch video readily available on their own, you might need to make computers available before/after school or lunch. If there are a lot of students who need this perhaps having it play on the projector at lunch.

In any case depending on how many videos you have for your students and the pace of your curriculum, I would stress how important it is to give your students a couple of days to watch it in case they need accommodations like choices 3 or 4.

Now you have shared your videos with your classroom (and the world)! So what will you do with your extra class time? I would stress how important it is to still have that dialog with your students about the content where you can answer questions and clarification. However, now your students have had a day or so to process the information and they will have more questions and perhaps you can go more in depth than you previously could have.

This is also a wonderful opportunity for you to introduce multiple learning styles into your classroom. With so much to cover this was always a struggle, but now think of all of the projects, labs, debates, plays, hands-on-activities, etc you can go through with the students (they could even make their own creative videos!). So often I never truly understood a concept until I was able to kinesthetically interact with it so I encourage you to be creative in all of the different ways you can cover a concept.

Please don't just continue on with the curriculum or try and cover more. One of the biggest criticisms of American Education is that it is a mile long and an inch deep. Your students need more than a day to develop an interest and understanding of the content. I always keep a chart of Bloom's taxonomy to help me determine how I should plan my lessons so that they increase in their depth of understanding as the week/month progresses.

Most importantly, we are liberated from lectures. While we still need to produce the video, it can be played over and over again and will allow us the freedom to spend more time going in depth with our students. 


Did you become a teacher so you could mindlessly talk for hours about the information that could be just as easily obtained from a textbook or website? Or did you do it because of your passion for the content and the magical moments with students, helping them understand and develop interest.

You are free to be the teacher you always wanted to be, this is technology properly utilized.

If you have any questions, concerns, suggestions, tips, please leave a comment.

Thanks as always for reading!

Creating Video Tutorials for your Class Part 1

Welcome back, in the last post, I referred to video tutorials as an incredible asset to your classroom and some of they benefits you would see from using them. I have taught with and without them and, I can truly say that this is worth your time.

Why should you consider making video tutorials:
If you were to ask educators what they consider the most time consuming and frustrating part of their classroom, I believe they would overwhelmingly say that it is the lecturing. The preparation and gathering of the facts, the creation of a delivery method (whiteboard, powerpoint, demonstration, etc), blank stares from students, repetition and hopes of retention, wear and tear on your voice and mind from repeating yourself 3-6 times a day, and the list continues. When I have surveyed teachers as to why they continue to lecture, they say it is the best way to deliver a large amount of content.

This is true, there is no faster way to deliver content. However, studies as well as my own classroom experience continually show that lecturing is one of the most difficult ways for students to learn content. Why is lecturing such a pervasive practice? Consider that up until the last few hundred years, content was very expensive or scarce. Either you had access to a book (which required the ability to read) or you heard a lecture from someone who knew what they were talking about. This practice has continued in all levels of education around the world even though the environment has changed.  Content (books/Internet) is so pervasive now that the time has come to rethink why and how we lecture.

With so little time in the school year do we really want to spend 50-75%  of our time doing that which the Internet or textbooks can do already? But I can hear the concerns, that there is so much poor or erroneous material out there and that there is no replacement for a discussion between teacher and students to go more in depth or clear up misconceptions. I agree 100% with both of these points and I believe video tutorials is not a replacement for the teacher in the classroom but a method of freeing up the educator to personalize and encourage more in depth understanding.

However, there is in my opinion, a right way and a wrong way to implement them into your classroom. This post will talk about how to create the tutorial and the next will describe my suggestions for how to use them.

How to create video tutorials:
Creating educational video tutorials has been around for as long as the medium has existed. Yet in the last couple of years, the cost of doing so has become practically free. Inspired by Patrick Yurick, Karl Fisch, and Don Herbert I began to create Video Tutorials for my classroom.

What you need:

• Presentation Software: Open Office Impress (free) Microsoft Office Powerpoint ($$$)
• Screen Capture Software: Camstudio (free) or Camtasia ($$$ but has additional features such as editing)
• Optional:
• Webcam ($20-50, it should have a microphone built in)
• http://www.youtube.com/my_webcam (for video capture)
• WinFF (free file converter)

You have two options for creating the video and it depends on how and what kind of content you are delivering. 

Screen Capture:

1. Create a Powerpoint presentation with the content that you are going to deliver. I would encourage you to add animations that allow you to control when the content appears on the screen.
2. Start Camstudio
3. Start the presentation so it takes up the whole screen.
4. Push F8 (the keyboard shortcut to start recording with Camstudio)
5. Begin narrating through your presentation as if you were lecturing to your students, clicking through the presentation.
6. If you need to start over, push F10 to cancel and start over from step 3.
7. If you need to pause push F8 and again to unpause.
8. When you are done push F9.
9. Camstudio will then ask you to save, then it will take some time to process, and finally show you a preview. If you are happy with this then congratulations you have just completed your first video tutorial!