I got to thinking about this as the culmination of a few things that happened in a short space of time. Firstly, I went to see the movie Iron Man. Now this is a great movie, but if you are a real fan, you should stay to the very end of the credits after the movie. Unfortunately, I didn’t find this out until after I’d seen the movie (and left before the end of the credits. But it was OK – I just went to YouTube and did a search and saw what I had missed.

Then I read Will Richardson’s latest blog post – where he talks about how he brought his son home a boomerang from Australia and the first place Tucker goes to find out how to throw it ... is YouTube.
Then Paul Reid, who is trying to cure my Mac aversion (I actually don’t have a Mac aversion – I just don’t use one) responded to a post I made to Echalk about using 2 screens, telling me about Spaces and Expose .... and of course he added a couple of links to videos. Not on YouTube, but after watching the Apple video, guess where I went.

So, if a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a video worth? Obviously, we need the same sorts of critical literacies that we apply to print-based resources or even other web-based resources. But that aside, just how useful is YouTube? Well, as far as I can see, it’s incredibly useful. From a school perspective, it just has to be one of the most amazing resources available. I set myself some tasks at random to see if YouTube could help a student who was struggling conceptually or needed extension and found the following.

English : See how different actors have portrayed Shakespeare’s Richard III soliloquy. I found versions by Sir Ian McKellen, Al Pacino, Sir Laurence Olivier, John Barrymore and also a version with vegetables.

Maths : Pythagoras’ Theorem. 125 movie demonstrations on this – everything from rap songs, cartoons, live demos to working it out on paper.

Chemistry : Aromatic substitution reactions: Only 5 results here. But all were animated and explained the phenomenon far better than I could on a whiteboard.

Engineering : Damped Oscillations. Physics as applied to everyday objects including swings and rollercoasters.

Geography : Plate tectonics. Again, many cartoons and animations. Ideas for school projects.

I could go on.

In every case I was able to find a host of videos that were relevant and useful.

Of course, I’m being facetious when I say “All you need is YouTube”. There are many problems associated with its use – authentication, contradiction, confusion, inappropriate comments to name but a few. It can be a huge timewaster. When I get a few spare minutes, I’ll sometimes browse through YouTube, using search terms like cool, incredible, amazing, etc. Minutes can turn into hours quite easily. Those are probably the main reasons many schools ban the site. I’ve never been a fan of banning things, only of education and accountability.