YouTube In the Classroom for Active Learning (Week 3)

To begin, I'm a huge fan of YouTube, both in my personal life and in the classroom.  It's a great way to share video, and it's a great resource of video for just about anything.  I teach a very visual content area, and therefore I always need to be able to show examples of what students might create and produce.
However, YouTube does one more thing, which I believe writers from Educase Learning Initiative hit right on the head in the article "7 Things You Should Know About YouTube."  The article states "YouTube is part of a trend among Net Generation students to replace passive learning with active participation, where everyone has a voice..." and "YouTube offers opportunities for expression through video - a new spin on the notion of self-publishing..."  That's exactly what it is - an active medium.  The social site allows interaction, feedback, self-reflection, and much more beyond just viewing video.

In one of my media classes recently, students produce "how to" videos, which were designed to teach viewers how to do something step-by-step.  This demonstration type video is very popular on YouTube (and one of the primary reasons I visit YouTube - learn to do something!).  Students then collaborated and created a community of how-to videos on a YouTube channel for our school.  Student teams had to write descriptions, identify key words to make their videos searchable, and evaluated feedback from the viewer hits and posts.  The project was great, and students benefitted from it for all the ways describe in the Educate article.

"7 Things You Should Know About YouTube."  Educase Learning Initiative (2006).  1-2.  Web.  11 May 2013.  <http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7018.pdf>