LESSON THREE

YouTube has thousands of videos that are suitable for classroom use as an educational tool.  However, it has gotten some bad press because of lots of videos as well.  Because of this YouTube is definitely blocked to students as it should be.  But teachers still have access to it and can incorporate as many of the videos into their curriculum as they want.  I used them constantly in my classes because of the number and quality of art videos that I found.

Alright, you have found a video on YouTube that you would like to use in one of your classes?  What are your options?  First of all, you can play it directly from the YouTube website and project it using a data projector.  But what will you do if the internet is down that day?  And this does happen occasionally so be prepared for an alternate lesson plan.  This is what I would do.  At home I would download the video onto my laptop, flash drive or external hard drive.  Then I would take these devices to school the next day and project the video once again using the data projector.  Oh, you didn't know that you can download these videos?  Want to learn how? Well this is the topic for lesson three.

First of all there are lots of free programs that you can download that can be used to capture YouTube videos.  The one that I use is iLivid but why download a program when an online tool can do the same thing just as well?  The online tool that I'm talking about is referred to as "YouTube to MP3".  Do a search and you'll find several of these sites such as:  http://www.ixconverter.net/ and http://www.flvto.com/ .  What exactly do these sites do?  They convert YouTube videos to either MP4s or MP3s.  MP3s can be used for podcasts.  Below is a brief tutorial.

ASSIGNMENT THREE:

YouTube is not the only site that contains videos.  There are two others which are most likely not blocked. They are TeacherTube and Vimeo.  Use either of these three sites or others that you can find which are not blocked by Columbus County Schools in order to complete this assignment. Choose one of the subjects that you teach and think of a lesson plan that would work well with a video. Find three videos that you might use, download them, type their URLs and a paragraph for each describing how the video would be used to enhance what you are teaching.