Why Use YouTube in the Classroom?

Education, particularly in the area of teaching English, constantly evolves and as such, teachers are faced with the challenge of adapting themselves to the ever-changing expectations of the trade.

The call nowadays, is not just for the teacher to hold a university degree on education, but to be more versatile, flexible and able to use a cacophony of tools out there to bring the classroom and the real world into one single field. In other words, tools such as the web’s Youtube, for instance, which many of today’s young learners are familiar with, has to become part of one’s teaching, to be seen to be “keeping with the trends”.

In the past, movies like “Stand and Deliver”, which chronicles how a teacher learns to speak the language of the students to reach them, demonstrate how unconventional teaching methods (and the eternal belief in students’ capabilities) are able to produce results that most would think are impossible to accomplish. One such knowledge nowadays, is how to motivate students to actually be interested, participate and be engaged in the topic/concept a teacher wants to teach.

Our High School students today, for one, have so many distractions. With their Blackberrys, their iPhones, etc., many feel the classroom is just one of those things in life one has to endure…until the bell rings and they’re free to access all the social networks they spend most of their waking hours on.

To illustrate my point, here are a few Youtube sites I’ve used with my classes lately. Below the videos, you will find some ideas on how they could be of use in your classroom, from teaching English, to Social Studies, to Science and World Issues

1. Severn Suzuki, a 13-year-old girl from Canada, speaks at the UN Earth Summit in Brazil in 1992. She silenced the world in 5 minutes as she tells leaders to mend their ways to make sure future generations still have a world to live in.

• I recently used this to open up my classes during Earth Week. This can be used to elicit answers to questions like, “After _____ years, what have government and world leaders who have this speech done towards a better earth for future generations?”
• This can also be used in Science class, where studies on the environment are of relevance, for example.
• This can also be used in a Social Studies class, when discussion is focused on responsibility and accountability of world leaders or on the efficacy of organizations such as the UN is being talked about.2. Craig Kielburger was 12 when he started an international human rights  movement  called Free the children, to help children who are exploited in countries like India, Bangladesh and Thailand. Watch him speak at the Ontario Federation of Labor.

• In an Oral Presentation class, great discussions or brainstorming sessions could start off by having students watch this clip. You can then pose the question, “What makes this speech a good one?”
• In a Service Learning class/Ethics/Character Development, you can make a point about what young people can do if they put their heart into it.  Further talk could focus on traits such as being concerned and caring for others; service beyond self.

These are but a couple of the hundreds upon hundreds of videos available out there, which teachers could make good use of. What I find about these clips is that they never fail to catch students’ attention. In the beginning of class, when students are dragging their feet into your classroom, looking like they would rather be somewhere else other than in the school, learning, turn to these clips for some inspiration. After a few minutes of being transported into the world Youtube, most of the time, they will be ready to listen. By then, you would have gotten their full attention.

Tags: creative use of youtube in education, teaching english in thailand, teaching with movie clips, using youtube n class

Category: Lesson Plans, Teaching Strategies