Teachers and educators alike know of TeacherTube, the self-proclaimed ‘safer alternative to YouTube. Before this course, I had never been fortunate to be acquainted with it. TeacherTube was developed primarily to provide educational content for teachers and students alike, omitting much of what could be found on YouTube and other shared online video sites. Unlike YouTube, TeacherTube requires all content uploaded to the site to have an educational and learning objective, it must not advertise products or services, show nudity or contain profanities and should be appropriate for viewing by all audiences. Video has become an important media resource in teaching resources and training materials, so the inception of TeacherTube in 2007 has been widely welcomed and positively commented on.
The future of shared online video will rely upon the quality and management of the content, along with the ease of use the site gives its users. There are other educational video sites available such as edutube.org and mylearningtube.com and of course, many more shared video sites which do not have a specific educational focus. TeacherTube has been commended for its ease of use and accessibility, something which it shares with its big brother, YouTube.
The long term success and longevity of educational video sites will depend upon the take up by educators, trainers and students to use the sites and to include the content within curriculum, projects, courses and training materials. Mobile technology and services such as podcasting or coursecasting could hold the key here, but as video viewing technology via MP3 or wireless/mobile devices is still being developed, especially for educational purposes where video quality is fundamental, the take up could be slow.
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TeacherTube is great, aside from the fact that every time I have used it it has been slow as molasses. Perhaps it is just our connection at school, but YouTube is much faster so I can surf through videos at a more convenient pace.
ReplyDeleteI see the reason in having alternatives to YouTube because there are a lot of inappropriate things on there when it comes to school hours. I just trust that my students are making good choices about the videos they watch so they do not lose computer privileges.
I'm not sure who hosts TeacherTube but YouTube is probably considerably hosting it because Google owns it. Anything on Google's web servers go at the speed of light ;)
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