The site that I found most useful for educational videos was Next Vista for Learning. This site is was created entirely for educational purposes. As I learned from listening to the podcast, all material on the site is prescreened to answer four questions related to both relevance and appropriateness. Therefore, there is no question about the content being viewed before it is watched. In terms of the content, it is divided into three easy to use sections. The light bulbs area contains introductions to various content area lessons. There is a good number of math videos with how-to's on different operations. So far there are only a few videos related to ELA, Science and Social Studies, but hopefully more will continue to be added. All the videos in this section are well organized by topic and the content is easily discernible from the title. I personally thought the Global Views section could be very relevant in the classroom. In this section introductions to various parts of the world are given by students that live there. I can't think of a better way to make somewhere come alive for students that are learning about it (I guess other than actually bringing them there). I thought that the organization of the site made it very easy to use. Also you don't need an account to use it, so you can just click and watch. The videos are all only a few minutes in length so students crunched for time can still make use of them. I think there are already many uses for this site in the classroom or school as a whole and as it continues to grow it will be even more useful. I would love to make use of the Seeing Service and Global Views sections. As I have said before, creating a sense of community is very important in our schools. By introducing students to different parts of the world, and allowing them to see others doing good deeds, we could expand our community throughout the globe.
Next Vista was not the only site I visited. I also looked at Teacher Tube, You Tube and Clip Blast. These sites have varying degrees of educational relevance. Of the three, Teacher Tube was the most useful. It had a great number of videos on "educational" topics. However, unlike Next Vista, these videos are not prescreened for content. Therefore they may or may not be appropriate or useful in a classroom. Some of the videos on Teacher Tube were rather lengthy. From the sample I looked at these videos may be more engaging that some of the Next Vista videos. For example there were raps and cheers about math operations. I think that these videos would make a good introduction to a topic and would build student interest. Overall, I found the site less easy to use than Next Vista and think it would take more prescreening by teachers to use the videos in the classroom. But students might like to watch them as a way to remember information while studying. I found You Tube and Clip Blast to be the least useful for educational purposes, but then again, that is not what they were designed for. Both are set up for general video sharing, and therefore the majority of the content is both irrelevant and inappropriate for schools. That's not to say that there isn't any use for them in an educational setting, but it would take a lot of time for teachers to sort through and screen the material to find something to use in their classroom.
No comments:
Post a Comment