Choose your tool: Teacher Tube

Dear administrators,

I am writing this letter to inform you about a new technology, TeacherTube, in hopes that you will encourage its use by other teachers in their classrooms. I decided to experiment with Teacher Tube, since it sounded very interesting and I had never heard of it before. I have heard of many teachers incorporating YouTube videos into their lessons, and Teacher Tube is like a YouTube specifically for teachers to use. You can search for any type of video you may be looking for. I am working on a science lesson for my final about the classification of animals, so I decided to search for videos that would go along with that. I typed in "reptiles", and the first result that popped up was a video with a guy who is showing off different types of reptiles, such as iguanas and snakes, and tells different facts and information about them, including their diet, appearance, etc. This would be a neat video to show as an introduction to reptiles to show students what they look like, and they can see them moving and in action, while learning some general facts about them.

I next typed "amphibians", and I found a great video lesson about how to tell the difference between amphibians and reptiles. It shows a venn diagram showing the major differences while the narrator is explaining them. It then shows different types of reptiles and amphibians and compares their appearance. It also shows their eggs and how they are different. This would be another useful video clip to show to my class that would relate to my lesson.

If you don't want to do a specific search, you can click on the "Channels" button on the menu at the top. There will be different subject categories, such as history, math, science, social studies, etc., and you can choose the subject area and go from there. You can also click on "audio" to view the audio clips that are available, and you can get audio of people reading from books. You can click on "Docs" to see the different types of word and other documents available that may have relevant information or lessons for your subject area. There is a community for discussion, and of course you can upload your own videos, audio and documents as well.

This was a very useful website for teachers. If you am looking for a video to go along with your lesson, you should search TeacherTube before YouTube, since everything on TeacherTube is educational, and on YouTube you would have to weed through a lot of goofy and irrelevant videos before you find one that would have something that you want to show your class. TeacherTube has more videos that are put together to teach lessons than YouTube would have, of course, so it makes it a lot more useful to teachers searching for video clips.