The Youtube possibilities

I could tell you about a less well known ICT resource, like glosor.eu for example, so that my idea would feel more unique and fresh and you would not think ”Earth to Ann. Everyone knows what youtube is.”. But I won´t.
My believes is that even if most of you have used and are well familiar with youtube you have not used it in your teaching. Sometimes we all need to be reminded of what is just in front of us.

In my English class ( I teach fourth graders) I work with youtube every Friday. It all started with me asking the pupils to bring the lyrics of one of their favourite songs in english to class. I collected all the songs and sat down to analyse what the artists were saying to the pupils through their songs. Not very surprisingly there were a lot of sex and women degrading messages. So I thought to my self; ”How can we work with this in our English class?”.

I started by creating a account on Youtube, so that I could mark the videos I wanted as my favourites and also sort them in my own 'boxes' on the site. I searched for both the official videos for the songs, and for a funny or special kind of youtube published cover of the song. If the official video actually shows something that can help the students to figure out what the song is about I think it is a good way to start the lesson. The pictures in the video then become a support for the students when they try to figure out what it is all about. The alternate videos was supposed to end the lessons with a ‘bang’. These videos was intended to impress the pupils or just make them laugh – to make the pupils leave the classroom smiling.

This way of working with songs and videos from Youtube gave us a good platform for talking about the English language and the language significance in the popular culture. We talk in the class what the song was about, what the message to the listener were and if the message is a morally good one or not? Examples of videos I have used:

On the Rocks - Bad romance dance
T-mobile Welcome Back Heatrow airport
Pink glove dance
Nick Pitera duet by him self – Aladin

In the first lesson I told the students that the goal with this way of working was to make them aware of what they were listening to and what they were singing. The goal was to make them aware of the lyrics so they would not go around singing "Welcome to the candy shop, let me lick your lollipop ..." or "You spin my head round, round, round, round, when you go down, baby go down, down..." without actually knowing what it means. The pupils said that they never thought about what the song actually meant and they got surprised when they realised what they had been going around saying/singing. Also the pupils that in the beginning thought words like ‘bitches’ and ‘whores’ was funny have gotten a new perspective on this. This Friday lessons tradition has become the students favourite lesson of the week and I think it has been a good way for us to talk about the English language by involving their interests. They can discuss the lyrics in smaller groups at first and then share what they have discussed in the whole class. It is also good to let the students pick out words from the songs that they think is hard and include these words in their glossaries. (Yes, I use glossaries).

Another good thing with Youtube is that most of the pupils can use it at home and they can link them self to you channel. In that way they get easy access to the videos you are working with and you can use the videos for homework to. You can also carry on a good dialogue with the parents and show them what you are working with.

The hardest part about youtube is to know if you actually are allowed to use it in the classroom or not. There is no easy answer to this question. I recommend you to talk to your principal and see what the school says about this issue. But bare in mind that many people publish videos on youtube because they want it to be shown. So the question of what you can and can not use should include this aspect. In my example above I would say that the official music videos may be questionable but that the more ‘home made’ videos are okay to use in the classroom.
(About youtube on "Kolla Källan" from Skolverket)
There is also a educational channel on youtube, which you can find here.

Youtube can be used in so many ways. I also try to show motivational videos and other clips that can be grounds for a good discussion. To implement glosor.eu in your teaching is very easy. That site is created for teaching and the instructions is very basic. But Youtube is mostly used for other purposes and according to me it is therefore harder to implement in your teaching. We just don´t think about youtube in that way. But now you do - right?!