Monday 16 April 2007

Tutorial: Using Videos from YouTube

Sites like YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/) can be a really rich source of authentic video and audio. Many of the videos are great for the ELT classroom because they are quite short, so they don’t take too long to download and there is a vast collection all for free.

Sending students, particularly younger ones to a site like this can be very risky though. Even if you send them directly to the page with the video you want them to watch, you never know what other links are likely to be on the page and what kinds of unsuitable things they might take your students to. This quick tutorial shows you way to get around this problem

The Tutorial

  • It shows you how to use a simple template and 'Wordpad' to create a simple web page that you can embed the video into.
  • This doesn’t mean that you need to have your own website or web skills. You can store the web page on your hard drive. The video will still work as long as your computer has a live connection to the Internet.
You can see an example from here by just clicking on this link:
  • This is a funny short video that I thought would be really useful for describing prepositions of movement, or even a little bit of daily routine. Or simply just describing what you see happening. Students could either write a brief description of a short segment or take it in turns to describe to each other orally.
To see how the simple worksheet is created, just watch this Flash movie tutorial:

To try creating this yourself, you can download these step by step instructions:

You’ll also need to download the html template, just right click the link below and click on ‘Save target as’ and save the template to your computer's desktop:


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is awesome. Thanks so much for sharing and making this so easy. I have a question. So if schools have filtered YouTube, will this work if they create at home and the open the file at school-- as long as they choose allow blocked content?

Nik Peachey said...

Sorry Sheryl, it won't. What you might be able to do is speak to your IT manager, show them what you're doing and get the particular sources that you need set as 'exceptions'. This will depend though on the flexibility of the system used for blocking and your powers of persuassion with your IT manager. You could still use the pages you create to give to your sts for homework. Email them the page you create and get them to open it at home. It will work there.
Alternatively create your own blog for your students and embed them in there. Then they can access the materials wherever they like and leave comments on.

Good luck

Best

Nik

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