Aug 03 2009
THING 19 YOU TUBE AND TEACHER TUBE Reflections
I had seen a few You Tube videos before this course, but never had done much searching. It is absolutely incredible how many videos are available via YouTube. The problem is that there is a very wide spectrum in the quality of those videos. The ratings did help to eliminate some of the very basic home videos from the selection pool. I tried searching first for videos dealing with Jewish children’s books and did not have much luck with that. I did find one very nice book trailer for the new book, “New Year at the Pier” that I had already heard about in a podcast, which is about Rosh Hashanah and Tashlich. I never realized that there are book trailers, just like there are movie trailers. That book trailer would be a nice leadin to reading the story to a class. Under “children’s books” I found a very nice short video where Eric Carle talked about the writing of his book, “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.” It is always nice to share with a class an author talking about how he goes about the writing process and the creation of a book. I also explored the topics, “Israel Independence Day” and “Rosh Hashanah.” I liked some of the videos that I found for Israel Independence Day and Jerusalem Day that had footage of actual holiday celebrations in Israel. I think it would be great to share some of those with our students. There was a very neat video of people all over the world singing “Hatikvah” together at the same time which was great and showed how the Jews are all one people, no matter where you live in the world.
The “How to” video that I found that was interesting was “How to Make a Book with a Secret Compartment.” And another one that I found interesting was from Israelicious, the Israel cooking show, where Phillis Glazer shared an easy way to make Sufganiyot, jelly doughnuts, which are traditionally eaten on Hanukkah. There are definitely many You Tube videos that could prove useful in a classroom setting, and the fact that many are short is a plus, though you can always fast forward on the longer ones. One can also create your own videos with students to upload to YouTube-I would have to read more about what is being done with this and the safety issues involved with having the student’s images out there on the web, before pursuing this further.
Teacher Tube was not as impressive. I found it hard to use and could not locate much interesting content on the same Jewish topics that I had many hits on in YouTube.
The video that I want to embed and share is “Jerusalem Day Music” where you get to see how Jerusalem Day is actually celebrated in Jerusalem.
