YouTube, Improper Use in Middle School

Teaching 6th and 7th graders proper internet usage is of course one of my top priorities as a technology educator yet I find myself still pondering wether my school should allow students access to Youtube. Currently e have access and it is one of the many reasons I took this particular position. Open technology, Yeah!


Recently we have implemented a new eportfolio system at my school district called Mahara. With it comes the ability to download videos and post comments on a wall similar to facebook. A dream come true, yet as I have used it to grade projects in the past few months, I am absolutely appalled at some of the content students are williing to put on their school eportfolio profiles. Do they not hear us? Do they not care? It has gotten to the point where my school is strongly considering removing youtube access. We teach young adults and they make their own choices, after we teach them proper internet usage, how can we help them make the proper decisions about proper content? How do we get our student to see that we teach proper content for a reason and thay thier choices will have the negative side effect of having filters put in place?

Media Sharing

My thoughts on media sharing: The Role of Emerging Technologies

I think media sharing is really exciting. Emerging interactive media enable new types of educational representations and contexts for creating, sharing, and mastering knowledge. This is driving major shifts in the teaching and research, yet finding the right sites can be very important for K-12 educators. For example, if you go to YouTube and click on education link, the very first video hit is called “Hot XXX Lesbian Action”. You can guarantee that when I become a full time educator, I will not allow my students to go to YouTube, however we have a lot of great content out there that’s helps us to teach as well as supplement our lessons. For example, on teachertube, I immediately found a great clip on internet safety that I shared with friends in education as well as posting it to my wiki site. This is a wonderful tool that allows us to teach our students multimedia while providing various sources of information. I have also considered its impact on visual learners as well. Those students, who do not understand a concept via lecture or class work, may find concepts more meaningful if watching them in context. I especially love the videos produced by students. Many of them are showing us the steps of how they came to produce something or summarize what they have learned. It’s like peer tutoring on a whole new level. Just check out some of the wonderful video’s that have been produced on http://www.youtube.com/user/saschool.