So much is being said about incorporating technology in the classroom, so I asked myself what websites are most popular to students. The answer is the fairly obvious list of facebook, myspace, youtube, etc. So I searched for a youtube for education and sure enough I stumbled upon TeacherTube.com. The website was created by teachers, for teachers, and survives because of the input from members of the teaching community. The website functions similarly to Youtube, but has a screening process ensuring all videos are appropriate to the teaching cause. Also, written documents, photographs, and audio sound bytes are available through TeacherTube.
The website can be utilized by students and teachers alike. For teachers it can provide countless different methods to teaching a given subject. I searched “The Great Gatsby” and yielded hundreds of results through different mediums. If a teacher needs a long amount of lecture time to convey a lesson, using videos can be effective in breaking up the monotony. Also, for technologically savvy teachers, these videos can serve as inspiration to create new videos, upload to them website, and use them in the classroom. If the teacher is unsure about the video or lesson, he/she can upload the video and receive feedback from other TeachTube members. Personally, I would like to use this website to create a video for the purpose of modeling. After viewing my creation, I would like to assign a project in which students make a video of their own and are able to upload it to the website (assuming I am teaching in a school in which the students have access to such technology).
Overall, I would recommend people give this site a try. It has some flaws; for instance, when I searched “The Great Gatsby” in a video only search it yielded many videos that had nothing to do with the novel. Nevertheless, most of what I saw when exploring this site was positive. It is almost always find it beneficial to engage teachers in technology.
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