Tuesday, September 18, 2012

SchoolTube: Learning Without the Risk of Explicit Content

There's a dilemma in the K-12 Educational Realm: to block YouTube or not to block YouTube. Parents have the same dilemma at home too. There's a lot of explicit and suggestive videos on YouTube that most teachers/parents wouldn't allow children to be exposed to. The opposite is true as well: there's a lot of fantastic content on YouTube that can help kids in the learning journey. Each school and family makes up their own rules on how to navigate this problem. However, the father and son team of Carl and Andrew Arizpe are giving us all an alternative. It's called SchoolTube. It has all the good parts of YouTube without the risks of inappropriate content. The way that SchoolTube creates this safe environment is to empower teachers to moderate the videos posted to SchoolTube by their very own students. NEAT! Like YouTube, no account is necessary to view videos and the collection of interesting clips tops over 400,000 videos at the moment. Here's one example below that provides a fun and useful introduction to the Periodic Table of Elements. Chemistry geeks will love this.
The main page of SchoolTube also contains a "Video of the Day" that is judged worthy by users. Pretty cool. Do you have any experience with SchoolTube? Are there any other advantages or disadvantages? If so, let us know by leaving a comment below.

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