Utilizing YouTube/Vimeo in the Classroom and in Professional Development

I guess I will start with the obligatory introduction as this will be my first "real" blog post.  I am the technology integration specialist for the Tri-Creek School Corporation located in Lowell, IN.  I started my career as the P.E./Health teacher and Wrestling Coach.  Last year the principal at my school challenged me to integrate more technology into my classroom and that started my journey to where I am today.  I'm excited with my new career and I hope to share my experiences (successes and failures) here.

Since I've started my new career in Tech Integration, I've been thinking of different ways of delivering PD to teachers in the district and some ways to use video in the classroom more effectively.

Professional Development:

I stole an idea I saw from a company called Knewton.

From their website the company is described as:
"Knewton is developing the industry’s most powerful adaptive learning engine. It is the only platform that offers continuous adaptivity—the ability to customize educational content to meet the needs of each student on a daily basis. Whereas traditional classrooms and textbooks provide the same material to every student, Knewton will dynamically match lessons, videos, and practice problems to each student’s ideal learning arc."


I found a video on YouTube from Knewton that integrated the annotations feature and made an interactive study guide.  Here is the video:




Immediately I thought this was the coolest thing I had ever seen.  The problem I had was I was no longer in the classroom to use it.  I wanted to find a way to get the idea out to my teachers, while at the same time deliver some PD in an interactive way.  This is what I came up with.





I was worried when I sent this video out that teachers would not take to it, or be as excited as I was when I saw it for the first time.  To my surprise, I got GREAT feedback from everyone who watched the video.  It seemed to give teachers something that they enjoyed seeing as it wasn't just something you watched, but had elements of being interactive. I am going to continue to offer part of our PD in our school district in this manner.

Video in the Classroom:

As a teacher I really struggled with how to utilize video in my classroom.  I wanted to find ways to make it engaging to kids and not just show them some information.  I tried a lot of different things to try to do this: using Twitter to have discussion about the video, have students log into EdModo during video to facilitate discussion, I even had students text in their notes using Poll Everywhere and created a Google Document that I shared with the class that had a collaboration of all of the students notes.  The only problem I found with all of these processes was that it didn't do anything with addressing specific standards in Health.

My wife is a 6th grade science teacher in my school district.  We were talking the other day about her standards and what she was getting ready to cover in the next few weeks.  She told me about how she was struggling with coming up with a "better than boring" way to introduce the Scientific Method to her students.  The problem that she kept running into was that to she wanted to be able to show the whole process of the Scientific Method in one class period so her students could conceptualize the whole process rather than just piece it together.  After some talking we came up with an idea of utilizing YouTube or Vimeo to make a video for her class that could show the entire process of the Scientific Method in a short amount of time.  I wanted to try to find a way to incorporate some interactive elements to her lesson.  What we came up with was a product that if it would have been done live in class, would have taken up to two class periods.  Now students can see the whole process in one period and have time for discussion afterwards.

Here is the video:



Thanks for reading!  Feel free to comment/leave some feedback below!