Create a YouTube Channel for your Class!
Guest Post by Nicole LaFave
In my first year of teaching, I’d spend hours each week gluing and taping student work on the walls in and outside my room. As technology progressed and my students created less work with pens and markers, I began to look for new ways to display their Web 2.0 creations. That’s when I began to exhibit their work on my class website. I downloaded images, photos, and other student-created JPEG documents weekly onto my website.
Then, several years ago, I discovered Animoto (read one of my previous guest posts about why I simply love Animoto). Instead of posting documents individually on my website, I began to create videos that could highlight those images in a two-minute video. After creating the videos, I posted them on my website.
Last year, I tried something new. I created a class YouTube channel (click here to check it out). Here, I upload the videos I make using Animoto, but students also download videos they make for class — original song recordings, book trailers, and iMovie videos (just to give a few examples). Students (and parents) love to visit our YouTube channel to see how many views their video has, or how many ‘likes’ it’s procured. Here are a few of our channel favorites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDEVD7cy9rw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAhFIa5H5uk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofZFcYQnUKs
I love our class YouTube channel for two main reasons:
- 1) It’s FREE!
- 2) There’s nothing to do but upload the video you’ve created onto YouTube (I do this through my school Google account).
I still think a website that displays student work is a great idea, but I find that sometimes I simply don’t have the time to go through and edit it in the way I’d like. This is where having a YouTube channel has been fantastic — after making the video, all I have to do is click a button, walk away from my computer, and wait for it to upload onto my channel (which usually takes anywhere from five to thirty minutes).
If you create videos highlighting student work, or you have a class where students are constantly creating their own videos, I urge you to create your own classroom YouTube channel.
Guest Post by Nicole LaFave
Nicole LaFave is a 9th grade English teacher at Fort Mill High School in Fort Mill, SC. A former District Teacher of the Year from Kershaw County School District, Nicole holds a B.A. in English from Clemson University and a Masters in Teaching English from University of South Carolina. With seven years of experience teaching in a 1:1 classroom, Nicole currently works with a class set of Chromebooks and integrates technology into her G/T, Honors, CP, TP and Inclusion level classes on a daily basis. A former self-professed technology pariah, Nicole now strives to teach outside of her technology comfort zone; she loves that technology can benefit her students and their learning experiences.
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