Webinar Overview – YouTube in the Classroom

Introduction

Our recent recorded Edublogs webinar was a fantastic session presented by Bill Genereux (@billgx on Twitter). Bill is an Assistant Professor of Computer Systems Technology at Kansas State University at Salina. He is currently working towards his PhD in curriculum and instruction. In the webinar Bill presented his research about YouTube, carried out recently when taking Dr. Michael Wesch’s Digital Ethnography class

The Session

This was a very interactive session both on audio and in text, with Bill showing a series of video clips to illustrate the outcomes of his research and to stimulate questions and discussion. He set the scene with a short introductory clip about the project.

Next came a look, from the student perspective, at student boredom in school and the activities undertaken to try and alleviate these feelings. This was followed by the scary side of the coin – secret recordings with hidden cameras! To finish Bill moved on to take a look at educators taking video in the classroom as a matter of course and using YouTube to publish these.

Conclusion

This was a terrific session with Bill’s video clips providing a great focus for discussion throughout. As I almost always find myself saying the overview is just that! It provides a “taste”, for the full flavour check out the recording.

Bill’s excellent preparation and pre-loading of the videos into the Elluminate Multimedia library meant that the whole session flowed really smoothly. I have been in sessions as a participant in the past where video has been used without great success and so was a bit apprehensive. This was a first for me in the use of video clips in a ssession where I was in a Moderator role and was (in my opinion) a great success. I feel that this was largely due to two things: a) the fact that Bill and I got together in an Elluminate room in advance and learned together what would work and what would not; b) Bill’s expertise and experience in working with video which enabled him to very quickly determine the best alternative for achieving his objectives for the session.

Just to finish up, my apologies for the delay in posting about this webinar. I was swept up into the fantastic 48 hour Reform Symposium Conference (#rscon10) of which more in a later post.

Next Webinar

SerendipitybsmallOur next Webinar is an Edublogs Serendipity – unconference session so bring along your hot topics and burning issues (what makes you spit with anger or thump a tub with passion) and throw them into the melting pot for the poll to choose our topic in the first ten minutes.

Join us on Thursday Aug 5th at 23:00 GMT/UTC (7pm USA EST, Midnight BST) or Friday Aug 6th at 1am CEST,7am West Aus, 9am NSW, depending on your timezone – in the usual Elluminate room