YouTube has absolutely redefined how we store and view the movies we make. Piles of tapes used to pile up on shelves or in drawers waiting for a someone to put it in the player and hope it still worked. Now we can watch everyone's movies anywhere we have a network connection. For teachers this means 100 instances of each Apollo liftoff to choose from, many great speeches, science, math, great books being read by the person who wrote them and also unfortunately some really ugly stuff. Many schools have banned YouTube for students for reason of questionable material and also possibly to conserve bandwidth. Hopefully too, their filters are sophisticated enough to still allow it for teachers so they can tap this rich resource.
Teachers showing screened content still does not allow students to upload movies that they made. From class projects to morning announcements to games and concerts, students want to share their accomplishments with the world via digital video and that's where SchoolTube comes in. This is a monitored sharing site where you'll be able to upload video and share via a web-link. Schools receive a screening prior to being able to log in to ensure continued safety on SchoolTube. Bottom line, it works like YouTube including the ability to comment on uploaded movies...but avoids the garbage that makes YouTube too much of a risk for students.
Here are a few examples to take a look at:
http://www.schooltube.com/video/30774/1st-Grade-Money-Stories
http://www.schooltube.com/video/19924/My-Culture--Your-Culture--Our-Future
Take a look at the how-to here, upload your movie and post to your blog with your responses to:
-Search in SchoolTube for a movie on a topic important to your class. How well does it do providing video content for you and your students?
-Can you envision your students uploading movies to SchoolTube? If not, what challenges stand in their way?
