Friday, September 08, 2006

YouTube Group for K12 Educators

Where can we find online K-12 suitable video content? Wading through the many uploads and contributions to common video and multimedia services is not always encouraging.

I have also been exploring Google video this week, in response to Vicki's (Cool Cat Teacher) great classroom applications where her students are creating and uploading videos. As part of our new wikispaces wiki we have experimenting with embedding videos from Google. Topics such as 'telemedicine' and 'robotics' have brought up some excellent educational videos.

Today I did some further quick research on search terms in both Google video and YouTube. (I also tried blip.tv but came up with more rubbish than I care to share with you). The results of the four search terms and the number of hits is shown here:
Education: Google, 4,086 YouTube, 6,581
K12: Google, 13 YouTube, 18,744 (a very odd collection of videos!)
school: Google, 20,567 YouTube, 81,184
teacher: Google, 2,157 (the second hit was pornographic) YouTube, 9,941

Essentially, both Google video and YouTube have undesirable and very unsuitable content which is easily found using common words as search terms.

As a starting point to making sense of this facility for the classroom and educational collaboration I am pleased to find that Dean Shareski has taken the initiative to start a group on YouTube called K12. Today I uploaded video #6 to this group. It is a compilation of images and podcast excerpts that I put together for the Podcast Bangladesh presentation at NECC06 recently. It has been available via my wiki since June and I have already uploaded it to blip.tv, as I have other videos and student-created digital stories. However I am now delighted to be able to join YouTube and explore the possibilities of sharing educational content and giving my students a space to upload to. The K12 group now gives a home to educational content (I hope) that we want to share.

Migual Guhlin also recently suggested a new domain name, possibly EdTube, but called for suggestions. This is in response to the fact that some educators and schools will not be able to access YouTube as it is blocked.

I am still not convinced however that the YouTube environment is the best for educators to share, or Google video for that matter but we are heading in the right direction by at least showing the need for this online facility.
Does anyone have any other resources or ideas on this?

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