Youtube and the Classroom

           Something that I’ve noticed in the past few years of my education is the growing use of Youtube in the classroom. I think this has been one of the most influential and useful innovations in education. I don’t even remember Youtube being used that much in my freshman year of college, but I’ve noticed its use growing more and more as I’ve reached my senior year, and not just at the college level, but also in public education and in my own private lessons. The things you can find on Youtube are endless – music, TV clips, how-to videos – you name it. As teachers, this is something we should capitalize on. Not only does it help us to expand our own knowledge, but it also allows us to present information to students in a new way. I know as a student myself that often it is easier and more engaging for me to watch a video clip than to listen to a teacher lecture. Showing Youtube videos in class is a great way to get students’ attention as well as break up the flow of information.

            For my content area of music, Youtube is especially helpful in discovering multiple recordings of the same piece. It’s extremely valuable for me as a musician and performer to have free access to different interpretations of the same piece of music by musicians around the world, both amateur and professional. Youtube has changed the way we listen to music. Instead of having to go out and buy a recording, you can just look up the song instantly and hear it. This does have its drawbacks, because often the quality is diminished or the content may be incomplete. But overall, it’s a great way to expand musical knowledge. I know for me personally, I couldn’t afford to be constantly buying new recordings or albums every time I needed to learn a piece or wanted to listen to a symphony. The other great aspect of this is that there is a visual component to the performance. You can watch an orchestra performing a work, instead of just hearing it, and you can see the different instruments and the conductor’s expressions. One of the other ways I’ve seen Youtube videos used for music is having the score as the video so that you can follow along with the music. My music history teacher has used this in class before, which I’ve found greatly increases my attention and adds to my understanding of the piece, especially if I’m hearing it for the first time.

            As an educator, I think it’s really important to recognize all the valuable opportunities that Youtube presents and take advantage of it. I’ve even used Youtube in my private piano and guitar lessons to show students new songs. I’ve also used it to further my own education – I only took about a year of guitar lessons, and the rest of my knowledge has been self-taught, and Youtube has played an influential role in that. For visual learners like myself, simply seeing someone demonstrate something instead of reading about it makes all the difference in the world. In the future, I hope to incorporate Youtube into my classroom. One thing I want to be careful about, which I have learned from watching other teachers make this mistake, is making sure that I know how to use the technology beforehand! It’s very distracting when a professor puts a Youtube clip in a powerpoint and then begins to lecture, only to find that the link is broken, or wasn’t embedded properly in the powerpoint, and so they either spend too much time trying to get it work, or skip it altogether. Either way, this detracts from the lesson. So that is something I want to be careful about, not just for Youtube for other technologies as well – making sure that I know what I’m doing before I get up in front of students to teach. But other than the technological issues that may come up with any technology, Youtube is a valuable resource for teachers – both in the classroom and in furthering their own education.