Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Tutorials For Free? Check out Teacher Tube!

There are a lot of free sites and free tutorials online that will help you learn technology. My idea is that if you give teachers the sites, they will take the time to learn the technology as long as someone is giving them some kind of credit for it. You know how us teachers are, we need to get credit for things we do on our own time. Most teachers would jump at the chance to learn technology if it was easy and they didn’t have to go anywhere or stay after school and they got professional development hours for it.

Maybe this is not the best example of a PowerPoint tutorial because there is no sound but it is free and posted online. If you are illiterate you could watch this video and get the general idea of how to play with the technology. Just click the link: http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=8a1b48987a18d831f633.

I also wanted to add this video by having you go to the site to introduce a fairly new tool for teachers. It is called Teacher Tube. I have been a stalker at this site since there were only 2 videos posted to it. It is a great place to look for teaching videos. I love the math raps. It would also be a great place to post videos that you use in your teaching. The best part is that at my school Teacher Tube is not blocked but You Tube is blocked. Check it out and see if this is true for your school.

Lets get out there and promote these free online tutorials to our teacher staffs. Librarians get techie and start posting some tutorials for your teachers to use and learn from. Want teachers to use the technology in your building? How about videotaping your students using the technology? Or have your students make “how to” videos for teachers to view at their leisure, and give teachers professional development hours for viewing them. What about the students? Give them extra credit, community service hours, or make it a graduation project. Remember in the world of technology, our students are the natives and we are the immigrants! Our students have a lot to teach us and as we are teaching them to be lifelong learners, we can set a good example and learn from them!