About a year ago I had to take a video editing class for my Masters degree. I had always thought that having little videos of some of the lessons that I taught in class would be great. I was afraid of camera costs, uploading to YouTube (which can be questionable for middle school teachers), and of course time involved in creating, shooting and editing the videos.
After the spending some time with cameras and some basic editing software ie, Windows Movie Maker, I realized that the time issue wouldn't really be a big deal, and I found a SD video camera for $120, and most importantly our professor recommended using a site called Teacher Tube.
This site really is just YouTube for teachers however, there are some better advantages over YouTube for teachers.
1. The content has to be approved the Teacher Tube staff. (I found out to allow 48 hrs. turnaround was needed). This makes it safe for students and there are no worries for parents.
2. The site is free. Creating a membership is completely free. However one drawback to this is the ads. Now when I first started using the site there were just click able ads of the sides like many websites. The ads where mostly teacher related so that wasn't a real concern. What I really did not like is I started noticing that TeacherTube was putting 30 second commercials before all the videos. This can be kind of a pain. However anyone can create an account to skip the ads, so many of my students just created accounts so they could watch the videos without the commercials.
3. They allow you to upload more than just videos. You can add documents to accompany your video, such as quizzes, lesson plans or anything else you can thing of to go with your video.
4. Unlike YouTube they allow you any length of video as long as it is under 100 mb in file size. Most of my videos are 20-25 mb for a 5 min video, while the 10 min videos are around 40-45 or so. I have never found out that I couldn't upload a video because of size for length where on YouTube I was constantly editing down my videos to meet the 10 min mark.
When I first started doing the videos, I thought that I would use them as review lessons especially for students who were absent. But the I started getting the videos up a couple of days early for approval, and then I thought that there was no reason to have the students watch the video the night before our in-school lesson as homework. This turned out to be really good. My class lessons ended up being mainly reviews because most of the students had already learned the material, I just had to make sure they were doing it correctly. And a guitar teacher I was making the management of 32 students much easier because most students already knew what to do.
I really have liked the service overall, even with some of it's drawbacks, mainly being the ads. But overall I feel that this is a better video hosting site for teachers other than the obvious YouTube.
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