You Tube & Teacher Tube are Advertising Crazy! But still very cool.

Did you know it is possible to make 1.65 billion dollars in 1 year and 7 months? I was amazed to read the wikipedia entry about YouTube that says the three creators of YouTube did just that. Now I was thinking, why would Google pay so much money for this free service? The answer is simple, they saw the potential to make a killing on advertising!

Further on in the wikipedia entry we learn that an ad on the home page of YouTube costs...drum roll please...$175,000 PER DAY! Two days would pay off my mortgage!

I am very impressed with the ease of finding videos (i.e. took me 6 minutes tonight to find a suitable video to show my Grade 4s about the water cycle) but I am not impressed with the amount of advertising I see all over each page I visit! It is distracting and annoying. I cannot imagine showing my students a YouTube video in class with all the ads flashing and running down the page. I did however discover that if you click the small red square in the bottom right hand corner of the video you can watch the video in full screen. This would eliminate the advertising when viewing as a class.

Another feature I like about YouTube is that it is available in 12 languages! This has great implications for teachers and teacher librarians who are working with ESL students. Wouldn't it be great to find a video in a students first language (i.e. French, Spanish, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese) that would help them learn to measure angles for math or explain the life cycle of frogs for science? In the library, I could see using this tool to help students learn a variety of information literacy skills, library procedures and motive their recreational reading too!

Also from the wikipedia entry, I learned that YouTube has a 'Canadian edition'. Click here if you haven't see this yet. I love that there is Canadian content videos. I will definitely be making use of this site more than the US version.

I also really like the contests that are posted under community. I could see students being very motivated to create videos to submit to contests. Teachers would check out a contest that would match their curriculum goals (i.e. pollution awareness) and assign their students a group project of submitting a video to the contest "Calling All Earthkeepers". Students could watch already submitted videos, explore the topic, create the video and submit it. Talk about a genuine audience!

In saying this, even thought YouTube has rules about the content of videos, it would be essential that any video shown to a class is watched in its entirety by the teacher who is showing it. No surprise endings wanted! Teachers asking their students to use this tool for publishing would need to discuss safety (i.e. no names or other personal info), acquire parent permission and again watch the entirety of any video students are posting.

Despite the potential risks, I see great potential of YouTube as a teachers' resource as well as a tool that can be used to display and develop students learning. I only wish I was in school when YouTube was around...oh wait...I am!

YouTube is a fabulous contribution to the read/write web in a watch/create way.
Andrea

Need a reason to laugh outloud??

If you need a laugh, you have to watch this super cute video!

Click on the hyperlink below to go to this YouTube video and watch "Charlie Bit my Finger - Again!"

Charlie Bit My Finger - Again!

Shift Happens

As I become slowly more familiar with these web 2.0 tools, I am really feeling the pressure to make a "shift happen" in my teaching to support the needs of 21st century learners. This video is a statistical reason why we need to make this shift happen. After viewing, please post your comment. Think on these questions...

Do you think the laptop project in Africa is a good idea? Why or why not?

How can we use such videos to encourage a shift in our professional practice?

Do you buy what this video is selling?

Dreaming of...

There is a chill in the air today here in Langley and it makes me dream of heading skiing again!

Here is a photo from the trip my husband and I took to Big White last year with my sister and her husband.

Andrea

Click here to head to my flickr account for more!

You know what happens when you assume?

To be honest, when I first thought about photosharing I considered it to be an “old” technology! I thought, putting pictures on the internet is no big deal and there really cannot be much educational value to being able to see other people’s pictures on the internet. This is definitely not going to be a web 2.0 tool that I need to use personally or in my teaching. But just to be sure I wasn’t overlooking anything I decided to create a Flickr account and check it out. Turns out, I was…..

….WRONG!

In this case, I am happy to admit it too! (Just ask my husband, this doesn’t happen often!). After getting familiar with Flickr, I started to upload my pictures, adding tags to them, sharing them with a few new friends I found and started to come up with ideas for how this could be used in education.

Besides the very cool suggestions by Richardson (2009), connecting with people around the world, start online discussions by posting comments on pictures, labeling student made models or projects, borrowing pictures from others on Flickr and adding them to your tags, photo field trips or using pictures for digital storytelling, I have come up with a few of my own. Think of the implications this tool can have on the high school year book committee! Students can create their own captions to the pictures they are in to then be published in the yearbook. What about students publishing pictures of their own artwork for exposure?

As a teacher-librarian I am an organization maniac….here is a tool that will allow me to organize my pictures! I can already see that I will be carrying my digital camera around a lot more as I will take pictures that relate to what I am teaching, upload them onto my Flickr account and show them to my students allowing them to post comments. For example, I am beginning to plan a collaborative unit on weather for the grade 4 classes in my school. I was wondering where I was going to come up with a way to show them real technologies that are used to measure weather. Well…digital field trip here we come! I can also snap pictures of the different clouds that I see in the next two weeks and have students use the smart board to categorize them when we learn about cloud types and how we can use them to predict the weather.

What I like most about Flickr is the ability to tag photos. This tool in itself provides a plethora of opportunities for you to share pictures with others, borrow pictures from others and organize your own pictures in a useful way in no time. There are many other easy to use features that draw me to this tool including the organization tools, the ability to have contacts or friends on your account to share your photos with, the ability to put your contacts or friends into groups to share on mass and the every interesting ability to look at publicly shared photos from around the world. Today for instance, I found the spot on Flickr where you can see the most interesting photos posted in the last 7 days and they are gorgeous…frame-able! If I were a visual arts teacher, this tool would be my new best friend.

I did check out Picasa as well. I signed up for an account to check it out and did not find it near as easy to navigate or as quick to upload the pictures. In the short time I spent on Picassa I did not get near as far as the same time spent on Flickr.

With a cup of tea, I am now going to enjoy ‘traveling the world by photosharing on Flickr’. Won’t you join me?

Andrea

Richarson, W. (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Ready, Set....Go!

Welcome to the written documentary of my exploration of web 2.0 tools. My name is Andrea and I am very excited to embark on this journey because I am quickly seeing the potential of this first tool (blogging) in the education setting. I can just imagine students in constant conversation about the books they are reading from the library, sharing their ideas of how the library could be improved, exploring their views on a topic they mutually researched or challenging each other to think further about their recent classroom debate. This social learning tool not only will benefit me in providing a place where I can list and reflect on this experience, but also give me the confidence to use these tools in my teaching position. During the exploration of these tools, I am expecting to have both success and failure and am thrilled that I get to document it here! I plan on using this ‘diary’ of my journey to reflect on my feelings and experiences to better understand what my students may be going through when I integrate this into my school library program. But so far, this is easy! (I can already see myself regretting this comment---knock on wood!). I even know what a widget is and I have one! Check out my “shelfari” and click on “get your own shelf” to add one to your blog.

I think when using blogs in the educational setting, there are two very important criterions to consider when choosing a Blog publishing tool. It is these same two criterions that I used to choose my blog publishing tool for this assignment. The first is, it is easy to do. The second is, I have support to use it.

I had good advice from a former student of this class that had success using Blogger for this particular assignment. However, before committing to Blogger, I did check out Wordpress and Blogspot but in the end, I liked the layout of the Blogger examples I had seen and knew that I had someone to ask if I need help using Blogger. This security makes me feel like I can just give everything a try and have some fun with it without stressing about not being able to complete my assignments. I think our students need this same assurance when using these tools. They need to know they can give it a shot and have support in order to be successful.

I look forward to exploring the potential of this blog tool as an educational medium for learning. As Will Richardson (2009) conveys, technology will truly transform every aspect of education. Being a teaching-librarian, I believe it is a part of my job to be a leader in the field of education implementing practices that support the 21^st century learner. This exploration of web 2.0 tools is the beginning of my learning as well as the beginning of providing this support for my students.

Richarson, W. (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.