 |
| Image Credit: Pixabay |
YouTube is a great resource for teachers because there are videos on any subject to choose from. There are instructional videos, informational videos, documentaries and student-created material. This type of material can work for any class. I particularly like the video channels created by individuals and companies which primarily showcase videos on a particular topic.
When I'm looking for instructional videos, I have certain criteria that I like to follow. I wrote about these in the blog post entitled, finding instructional videos for your courses. Although YouTube is a wonderful resource for video, the problem with it is that there are so many videos. Sometimes it takes a little while to find something appropriate. In my opinion, videos that are short (5 minutes or less) and closed captioned are best for online classes. When prepping materials for a course, the goal for any teacher is to find the most suitable videos among all the others, as fast as possible.
Luckily, YouTube offers a great search filter system that helps you narrow down your search. For instance, this past semester in my Intro to Computers online course, we covered "geotagging". In addition to a reading assignment, I wanted the students to watch a brief video on it. So, I first visited YouTube.com and entered the term "geotagging" into the search box at the top of the page. The initial results were 16,000+ videos !!! Wow...there was no way for me to go through all of those videos. Also, I did not want to just choose the first couple of videos because they were at the top of the list.
Enter filters...
The filters menu covers many valuable video properties that would be helpful when choosing an appropriate video for your class. Notice how for this video I've chosen to filter for the Duration of the videos first and then run the filters again on with Closed Captioning. If the topic was more time dependent, I would have also added on the Date filter.
With filters you can quickly narrow down your search field to find exactly the type of videos that you can use in your courses. For my classes, I've even started an Excel spreadsheet of topics and the appropriate YouTube videos for them. The courses are arranged by spreadsheet tab so that each tab represents courses I teach. For instance, one spreadsheet tab is Intro to Computers; another tab is Algebra; another tab is CIS (Computer Information Systems). This way, when I'm developing my courses, I can just go to my spreadsheet and pull up appropriate YouTube videos.
