Teacher Bytes

Last week one of my students sent me a message via Pownce about a problem with our school’s YouTube channel. One of our videos had a video about Sex Sexy Girly Girls XXX Porn in the Related Videos section of the webpage. You can imagine the thoughts running through my mind when I saw this. No, it was not those thoughts! The thought I had was getting called to the Principal’s office with news someone saw the offending video and called the school or worse, the district office. I knew I was taking a chance using YouTube because of the varied content. However, YouTube is also the most popular and the easiest when sharing videos on blogs, wikis, e-mails, etc….

The first thing I did was to research how to make a complaint with YouTube about the offending video. Once I found it, I wrote a note explaining the situation and requested the video be removed from our site. Next, I flagged the video as inappropriate. I don’t know if this did anything but I did it anyway to draw attention to the video. A view of the tags on the video did not have anything remotely related to our videos, which I noted as well. Another action I took was to notify the Principal, the (as he puts it) good looking and buff guy in the attached video. Along with the Principal I also notified his secretary and our community relations liaison as well to let them know about the problem and I was working on it in case anyone called.

Fortunately nobody called and YouTube quickly removed the offending website from our page which I was grateful for (but the Miss Teen USA – Miss South Carolina video replaced it). YouTube’s actions raised their stock in my estimation. This incident was also a time to reflect on how to handle inappropriate content on school related websites. It is not a question of if but when an incident will happen. How will you handle it to keep the site running? Communication is the key element. Notify everyone who you think needs to know about the problem so they can tell the public the problem is being worked on. Another thing is to have backup websites ready in case you are forced to make a change. I have accounts with both Teacher Tube and School Tube in we have to change video hosts. Finally, make sure to let people know they should not panic when they see offending material on a school-related website. Schools and there webmasters jealously guard their reputations so let it be known you will deal with any situation quickly. Also businesses such as YouTube make money by having people click to their websites and see the ads. They would not want offend anyone either.

There is a moment that is almost every teacher’s nightmare. That moment that has sweat pouring from the forehead like a golf course’s watering system. That moment when the heart rate rises faster than a rocket. That moment teachers dread: a question from a student you cannot answer. Some teachers handle this moment better than others, deftly deflecting the inquiry with a subtle changing of the subject. Other teachers resort to the “sit down and be quiet” card. The problem is that teachers who must maintain order in a class and feel they must be the dispensers of all knowledge, cannot know everything because the information is growing too fast.

This moment happened to me today when Stephanie asked what I thought was an easy question: how do you embed a YouTube video into Edublogs? Easy, until I realize that Edublog does not work like Blogger which I have more experience with. All you had to do was just highlight, copy, and paste the embedded HTML code from YouTube into the HTML of your blog post and you have embedded video. Easy, except I found out it does not work that way in Edublogs. I tried everything I could think of to no avail. Nothing like failing to do something with a 6th grader eagerly looking up to you to give her knowledge. Don’t I look like the fool.

To call what came next a rescue would be debatable by some teachers. Another student, Zach, spoke up and told me he had embedded a YouTube video into his blog. He calmly explained that he clicked the yellow button on the tool bar on the Write Post page. He further went to tell me about how he copied and pasted the video’s URL into the box that opens by clicking on the yellow button. I tried it and despite every instinct telling me otherwise, it worked (Cathy Nelson you can stop snickering now). Zach actually looked sheepish when his tip worked. Obviously he was unsure how I would take the fact that he knew something his all-powerful teacher did not know. I just smiled and thanked Zach for doing a good job for teaching me something. I further explained that part of the class was for use to learn from each other and that he would be expected to teach teachers how to do some of the things we are learning in our class. The smile on his face showed it all.

The lesson to be learned  is that teachers should not be afraid to admit they don’t know something, especially with technology. With the Digital Native – Digital Immigrant divide we are going to have to realize we can and have to learn from each other. With an unpredictable future, the ability for students to learn things on their own and then teach us what they learn will actually help them be successful.