Thing 22: Online Video

You Tube is not banned from my school, thank goodness. I use it here and there to show fun, informational stuff, but I've never explored Teacher Tube. I loved it and found lots I can use already. I do an architecture unit in the spring with my fourth graders and found within a few minutes short videos on housing styles and a really neat one showing a group of kids building a geodesic dome out of rolled up newspaper. I checked out the TED site and there were many interesting videos. I got a little sucked in and ended up wathing all of Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford two years ago. Interesting! Because I teach third and fourth graders, I probably wouldn't use TED that much, because the video topics are much higher level. I might have my students access teacher Tube for videos on their current research unit. I would never give them free access to You Tube, for obvious reasons. There are awesome videos on it, but also many inappropriate ones.