Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Thing 9

I was already a member of YouTube and have used it quite a bit for posting and viewing videos, mainly for entertainment, not work, purposes. I find it easy to search for videos and to rate videos and leave comments. I subscribe to some people's videos so that I am notified when they post new videos. That's a nice service fromYouTube. I commented on Taylor Mali's video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxsOVK4syxU) and rated some videos by singers I enjoy.

YouTube is blocked at my school, so it is frustrating to search for and find good videos, but not be able to play them. I guess I could do something time consuming like finding a video copying site, downloading the YouTube video to my home computer, copying it to a CD and taking it to school. I don't even know if that would be good to do in the world of copyright...

Anyway, I found an uploader who reads aloud some children's books while the cover picture shows on the video. I guess if I had laryngitis, I could use this reader while I showed the pages of the book. ;) I think I may find more useful items for school at TeacherTube and SchoolTube...

TeacherTube has more relevant videos, but I haven't found a ton for the library arena. The videos I have watched have been nice, but nothing I would use in my teaching. Subject areas seem more popular topics for videos. And, oh my goodness!, it is super slow and has just refused to run some searches. I don't know if it's just today or my computer, but I would get frustrated if it's always like this. I liked that it has "channels" that break the videos down into areas, but there is only an elementary channel--nothing for libraries. I wish the elementary channel had further subject divisions.

SchoolTube had more hits for general library-related searches, such as "library" or "books", but not for specific topics, like "Dewey Decimal". The site ran much faster than TeacherTube. I didn't like how the results for my search only showed the partial title for the video. I had to click on each video to see what it was about, which wasted time. SchoolTube seemed to have more videos made by students or with students in them. An idea from SchoolTube is to have students make videos giving book reviews.

YouTube is my favorite of the video sites in how it is set up and how it runs, but it has the least useful videos for school.

1 comment:

  1. TeacherTube always runs slowly for me. I find that I rarely use it for that reason. Hopefully it will improve with time.

    ReplyDelete