Most school districts filter YouTube and with good reason. It may be edublogger blasphemy to take the side of the school districts on this issue, but even a cursory look at YouTube’s palette of hotties, mentos and piano playing cats convinces me that I don’t want a duty assignment in the Media Center telling kids to turn that off. Although I agree that one of our new obligations is to help students navigate a media environment with everything and anything available at any time, we have to pick our battles. Yes, it seems that another socializing responsibility and slipped away from the family and snuck into the back door of school. We should therefore highlight the benefits of the media that is available. And much beyond our obligation to model responsible use of technology, we need tools like YouTube to enhance the media environment of our classrooms. So while it makes sense to block student access to YouTube, it makes even more sense to open teacher access YouTube.
I’m lucky enough to work in a district where the Director of Technology stuck his neck out and made the case to the district and the board that it was a good idea to open YouTube to teachers on a trial basis. Four months ago, the door was opened just a crack, distinct user groups were created and teachers were given different rights than students. What happened next says a lot about YouTube and says even more about what some teachers can do when they are trusted.
Within a month, two instructional e-mails and a video tutorial were distributed showing teachers how to “blank the screen” of their data projectors so they can pull up the video they want to show without having students see the preview thumbnails that haunt the YouTube interface. Teachers could switch to “full screen” on their computers, un-blank the data projector and viola, no distractions.
In the classroom, English teachers created lessons in which students assess five different interpretations of the same scene in Hamlet. Students who would have never known the creepiness of Vincent Price have seen his interpretation of Poe’s The Raven.
Psychology students who were disturbed when they read about Milgram’s Obedience to Authority experiments, were even more aghast when they actually saw them.
Sociology students who would have had a run-of-the-mill discussion about the power of image in America, had an even more active and lively debate when it started with Dove’s Evolution of Beauty. Teacher questions prompts in class discussions were now be augmented with videos like Dove Onslaught.
Social Studies students now have current event discussions concerning the presidential primaries while watching quick news clips and candidate commercials. Perhaps you’ve experienced those good class discussions that involve a student saying “did you see…?” Well, now everyone can see. The students who are not tuned in politically, but may be intrigued by the use of religion (or not, you decide) in Mike Huckabee’s “What Matter’s” commercial can now be a part of that conversation, they can know what we are talking about.
YouTube’s vast library goes beyond the purely academic, its power is in short clips and quick search. How many teachers have you heard say, “I use that movie in my class, but only for a couple scenes”? How many truly committed professionals used to hunker down over their vcrs, trying to make “best of” tapes with only those scenes? How many hard working teachers struggled to tape Nightline and segments of 60 minutes because they wanted to use it for class? It’s so easy to do this now you can even do it on the fly during class.
And you don’t always need a projector to benefit from an unfiltered YouTube. An English teacher, widely known as a self-confessed luddite (and perhaps wanting to still be considered one) used YouTube for music, not video. When he found how easy it was to play some John Contrane for his students, he was convinced.
Perhaps the real untapped power of YouTube is in creating atmosphere and mood in the classroom. At least it makes sure your students are ready to go when the bell rings. During our French Revolution unit, I played Allen Sherman’s “you’ve gone the wrong way ol’ king louie” during the class change, its a great parody song complimented with a clever lego animation. No one came in the door late, everyone was in their seat with their eyes forward, and not a peep or pointless gossip was heard. The first four minutes of The Kingdom had the same effect and prompted a half-dozen questions about the middle east. Again, sometime you just need the music. Before a class on the Industrial Revolution, I ran a PowerPoint slideshow of historical quotes while YouTube played Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine” in the background. Although I’d be hard pressed to convince anyone that there is a direct academic benefit to this use of YouTube, students would have no trouble explaining why they would rather walk in a classroom that is using it. I’m not too concerned about the “you’re being an entertainer” argument because it takes exactly 15 seconds to type click play and about five minutes the night before previewing the clip. That’s a small price to pay to keep students from falling off the cliff of the media world when they enter my classroom.
In the end, YouTube is a collection of media that can be seen as entertaining or dangerous. Some can rightly claim it is just another one of educational technology’s “bells and whistles” that has a lot of flash and dazzle and no redeeming value. Essentially, they are correct. That is why YouTube should remain blocked for students on school networks. Yet when that media is placed in the hands of a committed professional educator, it becomes a powerful tool, which is why YouTube should be available to teachers.
I’m not understanding why you feel “it makes sense to block student access to YouTube”.
Could you expand on your reasoning?
I wouldn’t want to explain to parents why their daughter heard a flurry of obscenities from the student sitting next to her in the library watching something on YouTube. Nor would I want my school district to end up on the wrong end of a CIPA lawsuit and see our professional development budget drained by litigation. We know there’s more than enough obscenities coming from students themselves, but we have a legal obligation to take reasonable care of children. Blocking student use of YouTube and allowing it for teachers is just risk management.
The truth is we still have to pick our battles, we can’t do it all at once. I would rather teach students how to use this medium responsibly by modeling rather than playing a “cat and mouse” game, trying to stop kids from watching “hotties” in the computer lab.
It’s too bad that a school would throw the baby out with the bathwater because a small minority of parents might wish to launch a lawsuit. I would think the vast majority of parents understand the nature of the net and would still favor only light filtering rather than the entire blocking of certain sites that have much to offer.
I get YouTube videos linked to me by students all the time that they’ve found while doing research. To say we should allow teachers but not students to use YouTube alongside a goal of teaching students responsibility seems counterproductive. Blocking the sites by default is simply a way of saying, “we don’t trust you”. It’s hard to teach any values when we start off on the wrong foot.
I do understand what you mean about risk-management though. It’s just too bad that things have gotten so bad in the US (lawsuit country) that it has come to this. What I don’t understand is a fear of “explaining to parents why” such and such happened. If it happens, then discipline the student. What’s so difficult about talking to parents?
Put yourself in the position of the father of a 9th grade girl whose school librarian proudly displayed magazines on the front counter of the library.
Right between the stack of Scientific Americans and National Geographics, is a big pile of Playboy magazines. Even if that pile includes the issue in which Jimmy Carter admitted that he “looked on many women with lust”, it also contains pornography. As a father, are you going to feel any better that the school is going to discipline the boy who held the centerfold open over his head and displayed it for your daughter and everyone in the library?
I would not fault the father for blaming the librarian and the school for negligence. Yes, the boy should be responsible, but is that different than telling a ten month old baby that he should be responsible with a loaded pistol in his hand? I’m not going to try to teach the infant that the gun is dangerous, I’m going to focus on other things, I’m going to pick my battles. (If you beat me up for suggesting that a loaded pistol and a nasty video pose the same risk, you may be missing the point)
As a teacher or school administrator, I would feel uncomfortable trying to explain why the school allows open and unfiltered access to YouTube because it contains significantly inappropriate material. I would be just as uncomfortable explaining why our school library includes Playboy Magazines even though they include historical material.