Untapped Resources: YouTube as a Way to Empower our Lessons

Teachers are always looking for new ways to engage their students, for new resources which will reach their students and make something click, make them become genuinely interested in the material. Today I would like to present YouTube as a powerful tool for such uses. I’d love for you to take a few minutes out of your day to not only read this post, but watch the videos I’ve provided. Don’t worry; none of them are longer than five minutes. So, let us begin by looking at the challenge of catching your students’ interests.

There is a very classic way of teaching which still dominates most schools. This way is teaching directly from textbooks, or print. It is understandable to hold on to print. As Hartley (2009) points out, print was the driving force of the emergence of secular industrial society. I was the means by which information was transmitted during some of our most fantastic discoveries. It was the very agent of knowledge. This creates, as Hartley puts it, “children of print” who hold onto print as the primary means of intellectual enlightenment. But that can’t be enough anymore, not with what is now available. And just as with Hartley, Sousanis (2015) warns us of trapping our students in a flatland of exclusively-textual literacy. However, not everyone absorbs information that way the most easily. It may help someone to see something in action. Or maybe it helps to have it explained by an expert with more knowledge, and perhaps even charisma, than you. I present to you this video, which may be used in a unit about evolution, toxinology, or a number of different ways:

In this video Jamie Seymour, known for his contributions to the medical treatment of jellyfish stings in Australia, gives you a brief invitation into his lab.

That caught your interest, right? Through YouTube we were brought into the lab of a world-famous toxinologist, almost as if on a field trip, and received a small lecture about box jellyfish venom. These are some of the fantastic things that our technology affords you.

But there are other advantages to YouTube for secondary education. I’d like to present this example:

Periodic Videos, most notably hosted by Professor Martyn Poliakoff, is a channel created by the chemistry department of the University of Nottingham in England. They produce new, fun, and exciting ways of looking at chemistry.

How fantastic is that demonstration? It shows what an amphoteric material is, the potency of powerful acids and bases, and it dispels the common misconception that acids are necessarily more dangerous than bases. But what are some issues that you might have trying to bring that demo to your classroom? Well, obviously you have to collect the materials. Empty coke cans are easy enough to come by, but what about hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide? Those might be more difficult, might cost more than you have or be harder to ship to your area. And what about having a fume hood in your facilities so that you can perform this experiment safely, or the risk of injuring yourself handling the chemicals? All of these are very real challenges to this kind of demonstration which will likely prevent you from performing it. However, there is a way to show that demo to your class for free without any difficulty in gathering materials and without any risk of injury, and you just experienced it.

And lastly, and briefly, I would like to present my final point: YouTube can bring a context of society into the classroom. You can show them what the world thinks, what the world knows, and what the world does with that knowledge. You aren’t afforded these things with text, and simply listing off examples wouldn’t have impact. Watch this video:

Veritasium is an science education program run by Derek Muller, who has become one of YouTube’s largest science communicators.

In that video you’re given an example of how science can be counter-intuitive and how that can lead to common misconceptions. What all would that one video do? It would certainly make students value evidence over assumption.

Even given all of this it is not to say that utilizing YouTube comes without its challenges. Burke & Snyder (2008) listed two key challenges to its use, namely taking the time to search through YouTube’s excessive wealth of videos and making sure that the videos you use have appropriate content (in the context of both subject matter and things that may be deemed inappropriate for school use). I would argue that this is made up by their potential effectiveness, ease of access, and ease of integration into presentations such as PowerPoint.

As a final note I would like to turn your attention back to the three videos I’ve asked you to watch. In an attempt to show off YouTube’s versatility not only have I shown you a mini-lecture from an expert, a powerful demonstration, and science in a social context, but I’ve also shown you a video for biology, chemistry and physics. There are innumerable people putting great effort into bringing new and exciting tools for education to the table, and a large number of them are using YouTube as their medium. I would then encourage everyone who is trying to teach to look into YouTube as a resource for empowering their lessons.

Sources:
Hartley, J.. (2009). Digital Scholarship and Pedagogy, the Next Step: Cultural Science. Cinema Journal, 48(2), 138–145. http://www.jstor.org.libproxy.clemson.edu/stable/20484455

Sloane, C.B.. Snyder, S.L.. (2008). YouTube: An Innovative Learning Resource for College Health Education Courses . International Electronic Journal of Health Education, 11, 39–46. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ798652.pdf

Sousanis, N.. (2015) Unflattening. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.