Appeal to the visual learners in your classroom by showing instructive and instructional videos on TeacherTube.com. Kids will appreciate the change of pace from books to screen every once in a while and may be more likely to tune into the message. Here, you can watch Obama's Address to schoolchildren, just in case your class missed it on Tuesday. Or view instructional videos like the PB & J Writing Workshop.
TeacherTube says, "Our goal is to provide an online community for sharing instructional videos. We seek to fill a need for a more educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners. It is a site to provide anytime, anywhere professional development with teachers teaching teachers. As well, it is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a concept or skill."
Teachertube is often called Youtube for teachers. Anyone who has registered with the site can upload videos, documents, photos or audio as long as they address specific learning objectives or offer professional development for educators. Uploads must not violate copyright laws and be free of advertisements, nudity, profanity or anything else that might not be suitable for all ages. Teachertube is generally considered good at detecting and deleting adult content and obvious copyright violations.
<p style="text-align: justify;">Teachertube has several channels that are useful for teacher training. The Professional Development section has content related to best practices and teacher motivation. Career and Technology Education (CATE) contains many how-to videos relevant for the classroom, while the Teachertube Tutorials section provides advice on making better videos and uploading them. There are also channels dedicated to subjects, such as English or Mathematics, or age groups, such as elementary or university students.
<p style="text-align: justify;">A major advantage of Teachertube is its ease of access - anyone who registers can upload content. This means that trainee teachers can easily produce videos of best practices, lesson content, or themselves teaching in the classroom and share the videos with others on the Internet. Content is diverse, featuring classrooms and teachers from all over the world.
<p style="text-align: justify;">Teachertube's ease of access is also its main weakness. The quality of videos on Teachertube varies widely depending on the skill of their creators. Some videos are nearly of professional quality while others look like they were shot on the fly with a mobile phone. Since the contributors are also responsible for the video's title and key word tags, searching for specific content can be difficult and time consuming. An additional weakness is that downloading and streaming are slow compared to other sites.
