Chapter 3 YouTube…
It’s hard to believe YouTube started in 2005!
I really enjoyed this chapter and I was inspired to make a short movie for another class I’m taking. Making a movie is always a “time pit”, but it’s easy and fun. This chapter helped me understand what a great resource YouTube is and how it can be used in the classroom.
Before I read this chapter, I understood YouTube to be a website where people post videos. The videos can be about anything and if you want you can leave a comment.
I never considered YouTube as a online community giving feedback and moral and technical support to people producing and posting the video. Parker makes a point of how strong this peer to peer reinforcement is to our students.
The vignettes of the three students “Wendy”, “Frank” and “Max” were powerful to me. As I read them, I wrote “engagement”, “empowerment”, “creativity”, “activism”, “community”, and “belonging” in the column of the book. It seems like YouTube can be “ultimate engagement tool” especially for students struggling to belong! It may be the hook they need to get involved and inspired.
Parker makes the point, that we want to be sure the “tail doesn’t wag the dog”. As wonderful as making and posting videos is, the project needs to be based on a topic relevant to the student or a project already in place. The video is a means of completing the project and receiving feedback from the teacher and possibly peers.
At my school, we presently have our 8th graders for a quarter of the year twice a week. This works out to 14 – 16 classes. Currently, we are asking them to choose a topic or issue that they are interested in or passionate about. Once they select an issue they need to choose what medium they want to share their issue with (e.g. podcast, iMovie etc.) and then they create their project. It’s my first time teaching this class and it will be interesting to see how it goes. I may decide to focus it more and ask everyone to make a movie. We’ll have to see…
Maybe when YouTube first started out it was "just a place to post videos" but I agree with your assessment that it has become so much more. Yes, there are videos online (too many I think sometimes) that have no message and no real purpose at all which our students are watching and consuming. But we want our students' videos to be more than these and have their videos instead join the community of creative and meaningful videos that can also be found on YouTube.
ReplyDeleteI think your multimedia project with 8th graders sounds very exciting and I like that you give them a choice of medium to present their topic through. At MSK, we are in our forth year of an MSK Oscars program where we ask students to submit iMovies for judgment and placement in an evening Oscars-ish ceremony (we even have a red carpet). As a result, our librarian and I have gathered some online resources that you and/or your students might find useful and we'd like to share them with you: http://tinyurl.com/49pufbq
Let the cameras start rolling!
Thanks Nick,
ReplyDeleteGreat link with a lot of useful information. Thanks! I like the Oscars theme, don't forget the popcorn!