YouTube for Teachers – Is TeacherTube the Answer?

If TeacherTube generates as much traffic as YouTube, there is no way to control if a video is vulgar and on the site. Besides someone flagging it, which any serious user of the site should. I think TeacherTube has potential to be a good resource for kids out there - if it is ever fully developed.

I did a quick keyword search (shows how many times it has been used in a search engine):

YouTube - 181984

TeacherTube - 146

I have not heard of this site besides from CR4, so I am lucky. This seems like a good resource that is yet to be fully taken advantage of

Jaxy,

Thanks for responding. Users are supposed to certify that you are an educator when you register. Some sites, like nationstates.net, actually require and educator address and a school website so mods can verify you are who you say you are for educator privileges.

I am waiting to hear back from the TeacherTube Admins to see if the same is the case.

If it is manned by serious educators, I think you will see it be fairly safe. And as all teachers should preview materials before they use them, that is always a fail safe.

It is only when a site becomes more bad than good do schools really jump on blocking it (or a school gets word from a parent that their child has accessed something they shouldn't have at school and gets parental pressure to block all variations of a site). That it is fairly unknown to the public might be one of the reasons that it has yet to be perverted. We'll know when I hear back from TeacherTube about certification of users.

Being that it is designed by teachers, I am not surprised that it is relatively unheard of. I know that it is gaining popularity with tech savvy teachers who are always looking for a way to get to media that is commonly blocked by filters, so I can only assume as content grows, so will it's popularity.

Interesting technology - thanks for sharing, Shakespeare.

A lot of my friends in college were going for education, and I think I've heard mention of TeacherTube once or twice - although I never knew exactly what it was for until now. From just skimming through the site, I think it seems to be a great resource. I was thinking about how I could have used a site like this to remember all those pesky math equations through the years. I could have just searched TeacherTube, and gotten help.

In regards to Jaxy's comment, I think that a site like TeacherTube has a more refined userbase so that the amount of inappropiate content is (should be) considerably lower.

Sharkles,

Thanks for commenting. As with the user base being more refined, let's hope so. The old adage that "You should always consider your audience" hopefully drives people who just want gross/horrific videos to youtube as it is more popular and just as free, anyway.

I am sure there are some who will try to bring it down; they are in the same vein as those who create computer viruses for fun. Let's hope that the majority can repel that type of person from ruining another resource for education.

Milo, thanks for the comment!

I totally agree that YouTube has some great educational material. The problem that I found, and as I am finding from other educators, is that more and more schools are blocking ALL of YouTube from school computers.

Some districts won't even open specific videos because of features like the text comments (that are not screened) and that the links to other videos that are given at the end of a video might be inappropriate for school.

When in doubt, block it all.

You should see the list of favorited videos that I had on my profile. My YouTube account was/is for education only and it was a great resource. But since I can't use it anymore in school, I needed to find an alternative.

TeacherTube doesn't have the content yet, but I hope that it eventually will.

As for teaching kids to make their own decisions about what is appropriate and why that is important, please don't miss next Tuesday's blog. That is the focus!

Interesting video links, too, by the way.

Thanks for posting them. I will be sure to share them with educators that I know.

You're welcome.

Our audience has changed.

For your upcoming tuesday blog- my comment:

When I was in school, the issue was finding information. It may have been in the library, but finding it was difficult and time consuming. But once you found it, it was good.

Today, finding information is easy, just go online. My son was 6 when he told me that he could gfind anything just by typing www."whatIwanttoknowaboutgoeshere".com - then he found ask jeeves and wikipedia...

However, the issue today is sorting out the crap to find the good stuff.

Its a totally different problem.

milo

Have you seen "EPIC - History of the Internet to 2011"?

It seems to be something that would really resonate with where you are coming from.

Thanks for the link.

milo

Frightening Shakes,

Except for the fact it assumes the relatively privileged middle class and the media barons are all that exists on this planet.

We are in fact now deep in a major economic crisis and heading deeper.

All is not as it seems on the surface and the voice of the majority of the people on this planet has not yet been heard.

j.

10-4 Jack.

" The problem with those folks is they do not know what shelf the book is on, they do not understand that the shelves themselves represent categories."

Exactly!

Take it one step further- How many would actually go to a book, rather than just get intravenous online injection of "Knowledge"? Not to put too fine a point on it, but young people take out electronic media from library, not books; Getting my son to use the dictionary instead of online is a battle of wills.

Much of my success on the job is that I kept the data and knowledge from my work at prior companies that would be lost today as a result of plant closings, buy outs etc. So product properties data etc. would have to be redeveloped.

Except I kept my data... But it's mostly "paper based" so not findable unless they give me a call. Fortunately, I'm with an industry association, and people know I can answer their questions...

Most of us today think that we have lived our lives in an enlightened age of information

Our grand children and great grandchildren will think of us as having lived in the last dark age, where everything was on paper, rather than electronic. (Like we think of the ancient egyptians!)

SO we need to work on setting up means of electronic "knowledge retention" (As individuals as well as families, organizations and companies).

So that we won't be thought of as mere primitives who lit our homes with squandrous electrical resistance devices akin to heaters- ("10 of Pappy's light bulbs put out as much heat as a 1 kw space heater- and it was just for light!) who had nothing worth saving or to add to their future.

Part of my motivation for posting here to CR4 is that I feel that I am contributing to a knowledge base of solved problems for future to find- besides helping out the people with the problem today.

Thanks for the thoughtful comments Jack!

milo

Part of the problem is in how internet is introduced in school. "Hey gang, here is this great big grab bag of information."

I love the internet. But when I use it I know the thread I am looking for is part of a larger fabric of which I am usually at least generally cognisant. That is why I am usually dead on target and able to anticipate the most productive search words.

I have the greatest trouble when I reject the usual and try to find its base in the literature.

For instance the issue as to light being both a wave and a particle.

That terminology is so used and worn that no body considers that it might be wrong. I would assert that light is manifest as particles that travel in waves. A different concept then the spoken unity.

Try and get behind that with on-line search engines.

So the issue it seems to me can be addressed by teachers refusing to accept the product of on-line research, at least in the early years, save the student explain what led to that particular plug in, i.e., the student provide some articulable reason leading, outside of just hoping to get lucky in a broad search, to the specific wording of a plug-in.

I suspect though Milo, and it was your contribution here that got me to look at this head on, it begins much earlier.

It begins with reading fairy tales and other such to children before they begin to read for themselves.

Somebody ought to do a study tracing how it is that we, before the development of the internet and global search mechanisms, or at least some of us, learned the general connections and layout of knowledge.

Perhaps we ought to develop a modern course in epistemology for elementary school. Eons ago they did teach logic. With appropriate cautions as to its limits Aristotelian logic, it seems to me, would not be above elementary school grade.

It is a major problem. Although I know the true spread of mental capacity, because of the general failures to properly relate and connect things, I often think I am surrounded by idiots although I am fully cognisant that I am no great genius, just slightly better than the mean.

Without solving this problem they can prattle on endlessly about developing science but never actually achieve it.

j.

Good stuff Jack!

First: Wave vs particle: Have you read Newton contra Goethe?

http://tinyurl.com/6cyhg2

It was written by my former neighbor, and Once I had read it, I never looked at the cover art for dark side of the moon the same way again. (hint, if prisms always split light into colors, how come we can see through them and use them in cameras etc where they don't split the light?)

Second: You wrote

"It begins with reading fairy tales and other such to children before they begin to read for themselves.Somebody ought to do a study tracing how it is that we, before the development of the internet and global search mechanisms, or at least some of us, learned the general connections and layout of knowledge."

Bingo. Our society dumps kids in schools and exects magical transference from teacher to student. In reality, the teacher is merely barely able to raise the level of the class, rather than exquisitely serve as intellectual guide- provacateur... to create another Curious analytical mind.

Thats why we home schooled. Our children's intellectual growth is far too important to be merely dumped on a bureaucracy that has way to much to do and disspates its resources on bureaucrats and off mission crap while leaving the teachers and kids with inferior books, conditions, and equipment for discovering Let alone understanding, the science or math...

Competent parents serve as epistemological guides. They relish the chance to guide and nurture their kids learning, to serve as their "host to the world" and help them understand with out fear or hatred, but nurturing the curiosity and awe...

Normal parents dump the kids off at school or infront of the TV and pursue thei own interests, assuming the "system" will take care of the kids' learning.

And now, its just log on and there it is .

The natural consequence of this can be seen in post 10 of the following thread:

http://cr4.globalspec.com/thread/20595?frmtrk=cr4sd#newcomments

Which can be summed up as :"I saw it on the internet, it must be ok to do, oh crap, this didn't work, its your fault, you elitist dorks!"

The internet provides information without wisdom, and that, I think is a very dangerous combination.

Thanks again for the engaging conversation.

milo

"...this didn't work, its your fault, you elitist dorks..."

You DID notice, did you not, that there were no replies to that poster's previous question? So having NO responses as guidance, s/he took it upon her/himself to proceed with an unknown procedure. When the results were undesirable, it was OUR fault (elitist dorks that we so obviously are to have not warned her/him!) for not responding!

To the best of my knowledge, we have a couple of true metallurgists, a jeweler, and some geologists, welders, and machinists with tremendous experience who could maybe have provided a cogent answer. BUT, none of them were even on that thread, so they likely never saw the question! How elitist! From the nature of the question, I thought the poster had some rudiments of silver refining already - more so than me, at any rate.

See, even I can make mistakes!

Yes. But I don't see how that makes it your,our, anybody's fault.

Our answers were to the original named poster.

My guess is that that unregistered guest was planning to do it anyway, he was looking for validation. When he didn't get validation , he went ahead and did it anyway.

The "what if i did it this way?" question had two major possibilities for interpreting the lack of response.

one, "nobody answered- This must be pretty way out. Maybe nobody's ever done this before. I should be careful."

or two, "Nobody answered it must be a non issue. I'm good to go."

This is the difference between statistical thinking and normal thinking. In statistical thinking the premise is , "i'm not sure I'm going to get validation. getting no validation, I won't do the change." (Alternate hypothesis fails, null hypothesis takes precedence, decision making rule is to reject the alternative.)

Normal thinking is "seeing no objections, I'm good to go."

To Jack Jersawitz' point, The person obviously hadn't done much research on the subject, and was counting on us 'elitist dorks on the internet' to custom feed him an answer 'cuz he asked, and its clearly our sacred duty to protect him, even though those on the thread had probably no idea if it would work because it was an alien way to their process. He took no objections as meaning good to go. Notas an opportunity to do further research.

In the absence of positive support, I tend to look for additional information.

Thanks for giving your take on it.

By the way, I'm proud to be an elitist dork in the company of folks like you.

milo

Well, I'M proud too, and for the same reason, ya elitist dork! What a term of endearment, eh?

But you misinterpreted my statement. Obviously you didn't notice the sarcasm fairly dripping off of my post. No worries, as someone noted previously, I use an organic, non-flammable, biodegradable, environmentally-friendly grade of sarcasm. It will not stain the carpet here in our chat room, and it leaves little or no residue. If you prefer, I can attempt to obtain a supply of scented sarcasm so it is more easily identifiable, but I do believe the unscented variety is of finer quality.

Well i thought it was sarcasm, but as an elitist dork it s hard to tell. I guess that smiley with the tractor feed form means sarcasm.

Besides, I'm usedto the good old white lead and paris green oil based sarcasm.

its an age thing.

milo

Milo,

"Competent parents serve as epistemological guides. They relish the chance to guide and nurture their kids learning, to serve as their 'host to the world' and help them understand with out fear or hatred, but nurturing the curiosity and awe...

"Normal parents dump the kids off at school or in front of the TV and pursue their own interests, assuming the "system" will take care of the kids' learning."

The problem runs deeper. I would bet that if we were to track the education problems of say the last fifty years of this (U.S.) school system in terms of demographics, we would find that as the system began to take in large numbers of students that came from deprived backgrounds and parents with few intellectual skills, most themselves victims of the criminality of the larger society around them and thus not at fault, not culpable for their situation, the entire system begins to descend into chaos, both organizationally and intellectually.

Your children benefited from their own parents obviously broadly based knowledge and education.

What to do about that vast number who have no such advantageous background. "Authority" seems only to produce the pragmatic and erroneous solutions such as that of the new, new, math folks who never think about the human brain as an material organ with specific laws of development and growth.

The problem is far greater than simple repairs or home schooling. I would suggest that to understand the problem it is necessary to look at earlier hunter-gatherer, collectivist societies, where although knowledge is limited, society is generalist, i.e., most all knowledge is held by all.

What we are talking about here is the loss of that generalist outlook wherein, even given the very extensive and abstruse sciences we now possess and practice, thus, there is no general understanding of matters as a whole.

The first axiom of such an outlook must be that all of existence is material, hence there are no mysteries, only unknowns.

The second axiom is that since all things are material they are therefore knowable, i.e., we can understand them.

From that point of course, using the very excellent instruments that human brains comprise for such inquiry, we are able to discover and set out the various categories of things and then the specific laws, i.e., codification of our mental understanding, as to how things come into existence, including social existence, and change.

Of course this implies that major social change is needed. These are not individual tasks that can be accomplished by small groups or families, not to impugn any success you may have had in that regard with your own family.

j.

"of course this implies that major social change is needed. These are not individual tasks that can be accomplished by small groups or families, not to impugn any success you may have had in that regard with your own family."

Au contraire, the change has to start at home. btw, thats how it was in earlier times as well. It wasn't the village that raised the child, it was the (extended) family.

The "villages" that our welfare society has built for the less fortunate haven't done even a poor job of raising their youth.

i don't buy the society thing, that just gives us bigger problems.

i buy the 'if not me, who? if not now,when? approach.

other wise, we share the same passion for solving this.

And I do "grok" your take on the failure to get a "universal taxonomy"as well as a universal Lowest common denominator of "common knowledge" as being a fundamental issue.

Great discussion as always with you.

milo

Milo...In re 'And I do "grok" your take on the failure to get a "universal taxonomy"' I know lots of folks read Campbell as a Libertarian, before Libertarianism was a common outlook, but for some reason I always read him as some sort of paternal communalist.

I do know, nonetheless, that we are not supposed to take from novels any truths as to an authors actual outlook.

j.

You are running to deep for me tonight Jack, By campbell, I presume you mean John W Campbell who discovered Robert Heinlein, (Stranger in a Strange Land) who was the source of the "Grok" I used.

If one doesn't get any truths as to 'the authors actual outlook" after reading Robert Heinlein, check immediately for respiration and a pulse!

Interestingly, I found his earliest stuff to be leftist, but by the time he was writing the book a year juveniles and later he was as libertarian as any...

have a great evening.

milo

You are right. It is Heinlein and the reference is to Stranger.

j.

Milo,

In re: Newton contra Goethe, I was not even aware there had been such a controversy. I have just perused bits of it on Amazon's site. Interesting. It is costly. Have to get it out of the library.

I presume you point to it because I propose questions on well settled issues as to light, or at least the terminology applied thereto which I think may lead to error.

You startled me with the prism/camera issue.

I suspect the difference is implicit in the fact that in the camera prism, instead of projecting diffracted light onto a screen, we are instead bending the light ninety degrees with a mirrored surface on the prism. Thus, when the light has been refracted in passing through the prism to the mirror coating at a 45 degree angle, refracted light is then passed back through the prism thus reversing the diffraction, and out a face 90 degrees revolved, and thence to our eyes and the machinations of the rods and cones and the color filtering therein, which pass the information on to our brains which again rearranges the data to serve our own needs and purposes, e.g., in the case of some lens sets re-inverting the image.

Interesting. These are only quick surmises. I need to think about it before looking it up on the net to see how close I am.

Or perhaps you will tell me and save me the work.

Well, I'm not the optics guy, but my take when i read it (When it came out)was that those of us in the english speaking world got sold a bill of goods by newton. Newton actially fudged data. Goethe's take was different. Sepper went to germany and examined Goethes daybooks and documents.

As I recall, one of goethe's critiques of newtons prism experiments was that the rainbow is not a bulk effect, it happens only at the edges where white and black are adjacent. At the edge (or on the margin, if you've just completed a doggone economics class) where the black and the white adjoin is where the decomposition into dcolors takes place.

When you look through a prism, you can see things through it. No need to go to rods and cones; fact is not all of the light is decomposed into colors. infact, most isn't.

Until you get to an adjcency of white and black. At that edge, the light breaks down. Its been more than a few years. thats all I remember. Newton uhhh- fibbed.

I provided you the link so that you might get some more search terms like "corpuscular theory" and also because you sound as if you could appreciate it. You understand that science and the ways that we know are not easy victories. The polemics between Goethe and Newton are an excellent window into how "the science we were taught aint necessarily the way science are."

My apologies if my lay explanation is somewhat off the mark. I'm a metallurgist, not an optical physicist.And i'll bet its been 15-18 years since I read it.

milo

There are some folks these days in science, if I remember correctly, that are saying that no matter how crude the "corpuscular theory" folks were, they may in fact have had a handle on some of the truth.

They are saying that because of the dark matter problems and some of the quantum theorist notions about "action at a distance" which suggests direct connectivity between all things in the universe. Corpuscular theory, if I understand correctly, said we all exist in this corpuscular soup.

Mind, I am not the holder of any degrees, just somebody who was fortunate to go to a very fine high school, Brooklyn Tech, from which I did not graduate due to the necessity of running away from home when I was sixteen. I only got a GED a few years ago because GSU would not admit me without, it mattering not my assertions that I could think circles around many of them.

But Tech, for the time I was there, gave me a lot. An engineering preparatory school it had full blown chem labs, physics labs, machine shops, a pattern making shop, and a foundry with a cupola, resistance, and arc furnace. We also had as a freshman year course Industrial Processes. At the same time as we were reducing iron oxide in a test tube in chemistry lab, we were studying the extraction of ores and reduction in industry as one example.

Most of my focus is from the side of philosophy, dialectical materialism as opposed to all the gibberish that goes into folks calling good engineers elitist and seeking "over unity" solutions to fuel and power issues and then calling them names when they are told it is not possible.

My first response to all assertions is where is your data, non-sequitors and mass popular beliefs notwithstanding.

Should be interesting what Goethe had to say. Sometimes folks like that, and in his day right up to the beginning of unraveling of atomic theory, physics, art, and philosophy were often intertwined. Read today they contribute a particular quirk on how we look, or should look, at things.

But, as to science the way it is "taught ain't necessarily the way science are" we must needs be very careful.

For some years it has been popular to assert that the models of the atom, molecules, etc., that we were given in school are not the reality of the matter.

In the early fifties I knew a student at Brooklyn College who was using frozen benzene and a precession camera to picture the layout of the benzene crystal.

Since then we have developed cameras that let us picture molecules and even the atom where we can see the haze of the electron paths around the nucleus although we cannot yet picture the electron in stop motion.

Funny thing is it lines up perfectly well with the "theoretical" image conjectures we had of these particles proving our analytical tools are very powerful.

The pity is that some folks call some elitist when in fact they should be seeking the same knowledge and solving their problems out of their own heads.

For those folks all the information is freely available. MIT is actually running on-line courses in physics and other disciplines.

Having said that I wonder if anybody is running an on-line course in philosophy where I can have a bit of fun. I love tweaking the folks who in a world where all the unknowable things in themselves are rapidly becoming knowns for us, they go on talking about the mind body separation and such.

And in response to your comment about family as opposed to the entire human gestalt, if the bulk of humankind's history is in communal, cooperative societies, and that is the base on which we got here, should we not consider that a return to that social form, on the high technological basis that we now have, might be of value?

The data is that was a beneficial social form. The form we adopted that gave us the high technology we now possess, although at a terrible social cost, is falling apart. Functioning as scientists on data, should we not seriously consider change?

j.

16 years ago (to the month as near as I can recall) I predicted that one day it would be possible to provide a complete education (less social skills, music, sports, etc. of course) over the Internet. Do the math - the Internet was barely in existence then. Netscape Navigator was still known as "Magellan", and Internet Explorer wasn't even a gleam in Bill's eye yet. AskJeeves? No, "gopher servers" were a new thing! Can't quite get a www. degree yet, but the horizon is almost in sight. I'm liking it!

It is just a matter of time. Distance learning has been around and solid for at least ten years.

I had the chance to teach a distance learning course in conjunction with three other community colleges right out of grad school (and this is going back a good eight years). The particular course used video conferencing, which would allow students to listen in to my instruction live and ask questions/give presentations. I didn't do it because I had some other obligations, but I still wish I did.

The only problem with the internet currently is that it lacks a lot of interactivity with other people. Hard to ask questions and develop relationships (as you said) when you are just interfacing with a CPU.

But I have kids that post video projects all the time. It is getting there.

Jack, Milo, and Enviro,

Thank you for all of the comments while I was out of town. It was an informative read and interesting to come back to on a Monday morning!

I think you will find tomorrow's blog entry in "The Jungle" also worthy of discussion along this same vein of educational philosophy.