Thing 9

I love YouTube. I use it for simple entertainment and I have used it for instruction as well. I have used the Melvil Dewey Rap on YouTube to introduce my students to the non-fiction section of the library. They love it and recall the 10 main groups of the DDC system with ease. I used KeepVid to save the video in a mp4 format that I can easily access after logging in at work. Although YouTube is not blocked for teacher use in my district, I choose to download videos I want to use in advance so students won't accidentally see any inappropriate content on YouTube's main page if I were to search there. I find YouTube to be very useful, but at the same time I do worry about users posting every little detail about their life on it. The social networking and community sharing sites are a little frightening to me to think that so many people can put so much personal information online. I also do think it is a powerful tool to get a message out to the public when before people didn't have a tool to do so (for instance when the public is prohibited from openly demonstrating, but capture video and post online for the whole world to see.