I am just going to put it out there that I absolutely love YouTube. I am THE biggest visual learner so it was a big part of my life throughout high school and it still is today. I used it in school to locate and watch documentaries for modern history and to help me out when struggling with my math homework. It has also been useful for this course, as online tutorial videos have shown me how to most effectively use WordPress, Weebly and other ICT resources that I plan to incorporate into my unit plan.
A number of us have also recognised the importance of visual learning in our blog posts, with many of us using videos to highlight/support/further explain the points spoken about in certain posts. For example, Sara provides a fantastic video explaining Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy in her post Bloom’s Taxonomy & Bloom’s “Digital” Taxonomy. Another example is by Daniel, who uses videos to inject humour into his posts through ‘pop culture’ references that are related to the points made in his posts. There is so much educational content on YouTube and it’s crazy to think it’s only a decade old!
What got me thinking about all this was a post written by Tess, in which spoke about online marketing and how YouTube is now becoming a way that people can make a fairly decent wage and even a career! A few years ago, a friend introduced me to the world of ‘beauty gurus’ on YouTube when we both wanted to learn how to do a particular hair style (lame, I know). I soon came to realise that this was actually a job to many of the girls providing these tutorial videos. I couldn’t fathom it at the time and to be honest, I still can’t today. But apparently it’s a real thing, and the following video provides an explanation of how money can be made by creating YouTube videos:
Today YouTubers are actually becoming celebrities from what they do. In fact, trending on my Facebook feed only yesterday was news that Two YouTubers, Zoella and Alfie Deyes, are being made into waxwork figures at Madame Tussauds museum! After reading about this and the blog post written by Tess, I couldn’t help but think of what we have been told in almost every course during this degree: that along with everything else great that we will do as teachers, we are also educating our students for future employment, sometimes for occupations that haven’t even been created yet! Are YouTube careers just one example of this?
I think that these days, for a product to become successful, it needs to have some sort of online component. This can be seen in the form of beauty companies supporting YouTubers or Bloggers to positively review their products online, or electronic companies providing online tutorials about how to use their products. For example, Smart Education (the company that gave us the beloved interactive whiteboard) has an entire YouTube Channel devoted to educating their consumers on how to use the Smart Technology products. In addition, it wasn’t too long ago that my mum purchased a coffee machine and she was surprised (and slightly horrified might I add) that to view the instructions she had to go online. Occupations are increasingly going to need people to create these videos and websites, so I think it’s only fitting that we make this second nature to our students, giving them the opportunity to create such things in the classroom (E.g. using iMovie, Weebly, Wikispaces and WordPress to present assignments). The following video is an inspirational clip about ’21st Century education’, which aims to prepare students for the changing 21st Century world:
Teaching and Learning with ICTS (EDC3100 Blog) 