The excellent Cool Cat Teacher Blog recently posted about youtube being blocked and has given her own top reasons why it is such a great educational resource:

1) Youtube has some great resources.

2) Youtube has valid educational uses.

3) With a rating system (G, PG, PG-13) or even an E rating for education, we could allow this great resource through our filters and filter by rating, not completely blocking the site. Now, we have no choice and many of you have to go home to read this blog post because you cannot see the videos.

4) Humans are deeply influenced by video, particularly those with an emotional anchor in their past. I used a disparate listing of video in the hopes that each of us would find one video that really pulls at our heart.

5) The effective use of video can give us breakthrough moments with our students. I most often find that the use of video has the greatest impact on my student writing of anything. If I can get them emotionally engaged, I can teach the importance of voice.

6) Youtube is something I use a lot in my classroom. Every 20 minutes I like to change the pace to keep attention and focus. (I find youtube second only to unitedstreaming — my favorite for educational videos and documentaries — however it is a pay service.)

Much more elequent than my list, but I hope the two complement each other.

She also includes some of her more inspirational youtube clips, including Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech above. A clolleague of mine has a poster of this on his classroom wall. Imagine if, when asked what it was about, he could immediately call up this clip. It invokes so much more emotion than the words alone.

In the posting referred to above I gave the link to my del.icio.us sites, but what I should have done was linked to my del.icio.us youtube clips specifically. This is only a fraction of what I have; putting all other clips on delicious is a job for a rainy day.
But take it from me; it is well worth the effort for entertaining a ’supervision’ class – and it’s all educational!

I don’t know how I would pick a favourite, probably the we are all just monkeys clip I referred to in another posting.

This one is just one picked at random. It brings a whole new understanding of Newton’s Third Law of Motion, which no amount of hand-waving in class could ever do.

But she is right; blogging (and commenting on each others’ blogs) is one of the few options we have to do something about it.

Thanks to those who have contributed to far.