My Personal Learning Space!

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This posting refers to the article entitled ‘Breaking the YouTube blockade’ by Jamie McKenzie.
Check it out as it has some really good information on the legalistic side to using YOUTUBE in the classroom.

In this journal article, the author looks at both the pros and cons to using YOUTUBE within the classroom. Most schools tend to block the use of YOUTUBE on school systems, as it slows down the network and may provide easy access to “objectional material”. However, if a teacher were to download specific videos and vodcasts prior to lessons, not only will the burden on the schools network improve, so will the monitoring of explicit material improve. By using YOUTUBE and TEACHERTUBE students can be immersed in technology and be introduced to a world of information and opinions held by other people which are being delivered in creative ways. Once this world has been introduced to students, teaching may move on to students creating their own vodcasts and publishing them onto blogs or even onto the school website.

This posting refers to an online commentry entitled ‘Integrating podcasting into your classroom’ by Colette Cassinelli, Technology Evangelist (2007).

In this commentry, the video quotes the following statement from Mark Prensky: ‘Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital laguage of computers, video games and the internet… our digital immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language, are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language’. The issue that this commentry then addresses is how teachers can learn this new foreign language and then use it within the classroom. By using a program such as Garageband (for Macs) or Audacity (for PC’s) students can make their own radio stations programs. In these programs, students can interview famous people (acted out by other students), recite a poem that they have written, give a verbal account of something that they see, and so much more. Podcasting can be a way by which students teach students about a particular subject, or even communicate with students from another school across the other side of the world. For someone who for the first time only recently made a podcast, I think that it has many uses in the new age classroom, and I cannot wait to have the opportunity to test it out.