I have spent the morning rereading the first chapter of Berger and Trexler’s book, Choosing Web 2.0 Tools for Learning and Teaching in a Digital World, and have found it exponentially more engaging and meaningful now that I have more context and familiarity with some of resources and references that they discus. Last night I spent the evening reading blogs, which lead to more blogs and links and and again it all seemed to be increasingly meaningful. I feel like I am starting to get it and that gives me strength, because I was starting to feel that I had no business taking this course.
So now, on to some discussion of media sharing and in particular, video sharing. We have long been fans of YouTube around our household and watch everything from music videos, demonstrations, goofy satires, and political and academic pieces. My daughters have even posted some of their own antics. We have participated in YouTube.com for entertainment, research, and sharing, and in our participation we have been contributing to content through our feedback and sharing.
I was very excited to learn of the online community TeacherTube.com and have created an account and begun to explore with it. According to Berger and Trexler, the content on TeacherTube is reviewed before it is posted and “is intended to meet one of the following criteria:
1. Address a specific learning objective
2. Be intended for professional development for educators
3. Contain neither advertisements nor solicitations”( pg. 146)
-the inclusion of advertisements can be invasive and distracting as anyone reading on the Web will know. Last night I was reading a “Wried” magazine article, “Honey, I Shrunk the URL” (http://tinyurl.com/253reh), and the advertisement on the page kept expanding and covering the text that I was trying to read!-
Will Richardson also recommends TeacherTube.com as a notable alternative to YouTube for educators. I followed Richardson’s lead and looked up Marco Torres (marcotorres.NET). Richardson notes that “every one of the videos that Marco’s kids produces has meaning beyond the classroom... [That they] are done for real purposes, for real audiences, and are a great reminder as to the potential of the Read/Write Web.” The SFETT, San Fernando Education Technology Team, (http://www.sfett.com/index.html) that Richardson links us to is a rich site that exemplifies the potential of video sharing to captivate and engage learners of all ages. (pg. 122). The kind of work that Torres is producing with his students feels more authentic and purposeful to me than any other media sharing tool that I have encountered so far. I think this is primarily because it is an audio/visual media and because that is what our “digital native” learners gravitate to. I the example that I have viewed, students are producing pieces with real purpose and for specific viewers, they are invested in the production, they wish to share it, and they desire the feedback. How many assignments where students are not using Web tools, can we say that about?
After reading up on the subject of video sharing I looked into iMovie, which I have available to me on my computer with a click of my touch pad. My youngest daughter has been prolifically creating video clips for some time now and I have not known what to do with them as they fill up my camera memory cards. Now I can show her how to collect, store, edit, and publish her work. She will be thrilled to learn that she can create content on the Web and receive feedback on her efforts. Wow! It would be challenging for me to use iMovie in my context as an educator because my students currently go to our school computer lab where they receive instruction from a specialist teacher. I have just one computer in my classroom and it is not always accessible to my students because of space constraints. However, as a member of our school professional learning community, I feel that I now have some understandings and resources that I can share with my colleagues whether they are already using media sharing tools to support teaching and learning, or are just wondering what tools are available and how they could be used in their practice. While I may not be using video sharing in my practice, I can be a cheerleader for my peers and an advocate for the usefulness and effectiveness of video sharing in supporting teaching and learning within our school and beyond.
References
Berger, Pam and Sally Trexler, 2010, Choosing Web 2.0 Tools for Learning and Teaching in a Digital World, Santa Barbara, California: Libraries Unlimited.
Richardson, Will, 2010, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (3rd Edition), Thousand Oaks, California: Corwin Sage Company.
