Thing 18: You Tube

It was nice to have an official purpose and excuse for browsing through YouTube. I found lots of random, funny and helpful videos. TeacherTube wasn't nearly as much fun, but I guess that is to be expected. I have used YouTube in the past for my classes. You can often find short clips to emphasis certain economic principles. Sometimes I have used zamzar.com to convert the videos so I don't have to worry about the internet going down at school and ruining my lesson plan. This year I also plan to upload a few tutorials I have made to YouTube so that i can embed them in my Moodle site. Students won't be able to see them from school computers but they will be able to see them at home. PS Let me go on a tangent for a moment and say that I hope that at some point Mesquite ISD will decide to unblock certain sites like YouTube at the high school level. I know that there is a lot of inappropriate content on youtube, but students can access youtube on their internet enabled smartphones anyway. In the same way students have consequences for bringing a inappropriate magazine to school, there should be consequences for accessing an inappropriate video from school whether it is on an iphone or a school computer. The truth us, we can't block every bad thing on the internet. It changes too fast. By the time they are in high school, we need to be teaching these students how to appropriately use the internet in a school or work environment.