Sure, there are a lot of videos on YouTube that we don’t want kids watching at school. But there are a countless videos on the site that can teach in 3 minutes what it would take a teacher a week to teach. Our kids are visual learners, learning through video is most effective.
For teachers like me who use their LCD projectors extensively to reach our visual learners, having access to YouTube in school would be extremely helpful. This year, I could have shown videos on solving systems of equations, finding the equations of circles, solving triangles with the trigonometric ratios, and this says nothing of how much I used YouTube myself to get through my graduate Java and Calculus classes!
But because someone made the executive decision that all of YouTube should be banned from everyone within the walls of BPS, I have to hope that TeacherTube- the ungroomed toenail of YouTube- has a video on the topic I am looking for, and moreover, has their search feature organized in way that a search for “algebra” doesn’t bring up “Mrs. Valentine’s Kindergarten field trip to the Museum of Science”. TeacherTube is not YouTube, it never will be, and it’s a real shame that teachers in BPS cannot log into YouTube to access its wide range of useful educational videos.
In any case, I have posted videos on TeacherTube at the ridiculously long address: http://www.teachertube.com/members/viewProfile.php?user=Shanadonohue
They can be watched in school, even if they take 5 minutes to load. There’s also one other option that[sometimes] allows you to convert YouTube videos to video files to save onto your computer and then show in class. I stress, though, that it SOMETIMES works: http://www.forinside.com/ In fact, it’s not even working now. Blah! Maybe this one works: http://www.zamzar.com/url/
UNBLOCK YouTube!!! Please!!
