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.
