Week 9, Thing 20, TeacherTube

This was not the first time for me on TeacherTube. During one building inservice where staff chose one of six possible sessions, I manned a workshop on various online video resources including TeacherTube, Discovery Video, etc. One objection to TeacherTube is that it loads slowly. I find it more palatable if I start it downloading and then pause it until it is done buffering. When it is done I then play the video in its entirety. I really can't stand when it shows 30 seconds at a time and then stops to buffer the next 30 seconds.

A lot of the videos are truly amateurish, which is also true on YouTube. There is a great deal of variation in quality. If one perseveres, there is good stuff on TeacherTube. A lot of what is there would be a hard sell to students who usually are looking for something more entertaining and flashy.

I searched for "librarians" and found one that was entertaining called "What Do Librarians Look Like?" High school students are being asked that question and the answers are amazingly clueless--much of it involving glasses, old, gray hair in buns, and shhhh. I can hardly believe that image is still at the forefront--I don't think that is happening in our District HS libraries.

There is a lot of information on Web 2.0 that might be worth checking out. I found a couple of neat Twitter sites as I am interested in learning more about that since much of the political world is using it.

I attached a cute video where first graders are asking President Obama questions. One of my searches was "Obama" because I am a great fan and this was one of the few that was original and not just his inauguration or some other event.

On YouTube I really enjoyed the Library Dominos clip--actually there were several, but my favorite was the one where the books are falling down in lines running around the shelves. However Conan has been removed so that one remains a mystery to me. I have used YouTube to listen to political speeches that I missed, but find that most of them are done in sound bites of five minutes or less. I have now turned to MSNBC online for the full speech in one video.

YouTube is really fun to play with--I wish it was available at school, because it is a great way to show something when trying to explain an unknown to a student. Just as an aside: there is a YouTube video of my son-in-law playing the saz, entitled "Abbas playing the Azerbaijani saz.