YouTube

With its slogan “Broadcast Yourself”, YouTube is the phenomenon of the 2000s. Anyone can be a star in YouTube. You may find any video ever produced for TV, clips of any studio movie, and videos of current events recorded and uploaded as they happen; name it and you will find it in YouTube.

Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim are the creators of YouTube. After working for PayPal they adventured into the business of sharing videos in the Internet; this happened in 2005. According to Miller, the trio struggled to find a niche for their video repository; finally, they decided to allow everyone to post and/or watch video clips; they created a digital village. The site grew in popularity rapidly and pretty soon Google bought YouTube; Hurley, Chen and Karim got $1.65 billion in Google stock. After the years, the number of visitors to the site continues growing exponentially.

According to huffingtonpost.com, YouTube was sixteenth in the list of most visited sites in 2011 (this statistic was ranked by Google).  Today it is third according to Alexa Internet, Inc. Perhaps its popularity is due to the simple way user interact with the site. Finding videos in YouTube takes literally one click and uploading is like sending a picture through email. There are phones and tablets apps that let you upload, access, and download YouTube videos instantly.

With such popularity rankings, simple learning curve, and ubiquity it is unthinkable not to use YouTube in education. Today’s education is adopting the “flipped classroom” model in which students using the Internet watch lectures at home, and do the homework at school. By reversing the activities, teachers are able to tutor students individually to bring  everyone up to speed in the class. YouTube is the perfect media to post simple video lectures.

youtube.com/education

Academic videos used in education are a new genre in video production; especial attention is being put on videos for mobile learning. Using today’s technology like camera equipped laptops, phones, tablets, or high definition flip camcorders, the production of the videos is simple. Uploading and sharing educational videos on YouTube has taken off; today there is a whole section of YouTube dedicated to education. EDU-YouTube covers primary, secondary, university, and lifelong learning.  The best part about educational videos is that more than 200,000 videos are uploaded every day, and chances are that the video needed for a class may be already in YouTube.

Students and teachers may join YouTube communities or create their own private channels of specialized videos for specific audiences; YouTube videos could also be added to websites, blogs or video blogs (vlogs).

Enjoy this Youtube video called Greeting the World in Peace by Jackie Jenkins

References:

Miller, M. 2007. YouTube 4 you. Indiana: Que Publishing.

Smith, C. June, 2011. The 17 Most-Visited Sites Of 2011 Ranked By Google. Retrieved on 9/18/12 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/28/most-visited-sites-2010-g_n_593139.html?#s94499&title=13_Bingcom

Jenkins, J. September 4, 2012. Greeting the world in peace. Retrieve on 9/18/12 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VwpxDCmTs4&category=&feature=edu_spotlight