Exploring YouTube

 

The Evolution of YouTube    

The first video in the history of YouTube was posted on April 23, 2005. The following two months resulting in 19 more videos with very minimal views. Who would have thought back then that YouTube would one day become the powerhouse it is today. It is the second largest search engine, with Google being number one. It has more than 4 billion hours worth of video viewers each month, 1.5 billion active users every month, and an estimated 500 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every passing minute. It is clear that YouTube has become the next step in the evolution of the Internet, as Google predicted when it purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion in October on 2006.

Personal History with YouTube

In the early years of YouTube, I remember using it mainly for music. I used it mostly as a tool for looking up lyrics and watching music videos. It wasn't until after I graduated high school in 2009 that I began to experience YouTube for more than just music. YouTube has become a living encyclopedia with videos and tutorials on practically every topic and project. I have used it to learn a myriad of skills including: organizational tips, toddler girl hairstyles, minor plumbing repairs, effective teaching strategies and tips, and how to use certain technology and its features. I have even watched YouTube videos on how to use YouTube. YouTube has completely revolutionized how the world accesses information and solves problems

YouTube Playlists

I enjoyed learning how to make playlists this week and the process of actually creating them. This is a great feature to use to curate lists of video resources for particular content areas, professional development, and personal interests. Using this feature can come in handy when I find videos of interest to me but am limited on time. I can simply save them to a playlist to watch later. Creating the playlists also made me aware of how many educators are using YouTube for their own personal professional development by seeking out tutorials and lectures by experts in our field that speak to hot topic areas such as technology integrating, effective teaching strategies, and the importance of building relationships. Through making the different playlists, there were a few times I kept seeing content made by the same channel. This led to me exploring those channels in more depth and eventually subscribing to their channel to get updates on new content they share that will most likely fit my needs and interests. Some of the channels I subscribed to are New EdTech Classroom, Alice Keeler, and Ditch That Textbook.  I also see the value of playlists for saving favorite videos that you'll want to use or access again in the future, as we always think we will remember the name but in reality it is just better to save it in a organized place for ease of access in the future. Finally, I learned through my exploration of YouTube that you can save other user's playlists to your YouTube library. This is a great time-saving feature to use when finding playlists that fit what you are looking for, and it also is a great feature to use to share playlists you have created with fellow coworkers and colleagues. 

Click on the links below if you are interested in viewing or saving any of my playlists to your library.

1. Web 2.0 Tools
2. Teaching and Learning with Technology
3. Twitter & Twitter Tools
4. Future Library Media Specialist
5. Special Education: Resource Math

Twitter Adventure

 

I vividly remember sitting in a college classroom in the fall of 2009 listening to my fellow classmates discuss and debate the implications and future outlook of a new application called Twitter. In my own ignorance about the impact of technology, I quickly scoffed at the idea and predicted it wouldn't take off.  Needless to say, I was wrong- very, very wrong. Now 15 years since its debut, there are over 500 million tweets sent per day on Twitter.

Twitter has been described as the SMS of the Internet. It has connected billions of people across the world through the use of short bursts of text AKA "tweets" and has revolutionized social media with the use of hashtags to follow and curate information. Personally, I am not a regular or avid user of Twitter. Throughout the years I have dabbled in it here and there, mostly to keep up with celebrities, follow politics, and to stay up to date on current events or election campaigns. I have employed the use of Twitter at educational conferences at the request of keynote speakers, but I honestly have never thought about Twitter's application in the classroom, especially since I work at the elementary level. The Twitter adventure I embarked on this week has in many ways challenged my thinking much like what happened when I first heard about Twitter in that college classroom many years ago.

Throughout this week I tried to keep an open mind about the capabilities of Twitter, despite my previous experiences. This assignment revealed three brilliant uses of Twitter that radically changed the way I view and will use the app going forward: hashtags, lists, and the ability to tweet from other applications. 

Using the college class hashtag #ETEC527 really opened up my mind to the possibilities and genius of using this simple trick. Hashtags make it easier to discover posts, follow topics of interests, and filter through a sea of information to find relevant content. Previously, I had described Twitter as not being user friendly and over complicated to use. Using the hashtags to search for content really made my experience much more user friendly this time around, making me rethink the way I had been using Twitter before. Another benefit of using hashtags was the way it connected me with people and groups to follow that focused on a particular topic or subject of interest. It is a great way to network with other educators and experts in the field. 

Using hashtags and following people are great features, but it can lead to a massive amount of information being sent to your feed making it feel cluttered, overwhelming, and disorganized. The list feature allows you to customize, organize, and even prioritize the Tweets in your timeline. I appreciate how I can create lists on my own by topic or interest. This makes managing the large amount of content manageable and more user friendly. I can even pin lists to my homepage so that I don't miss content that's important to me.

Cross Posting

Our culture and world has become immersed in social media. Its impact has changed the way we share and create information. I have been aware of the ability to share content to different platforms such as Twitter for sometime now, but I honestly never done it. This week I was reading a blog post about the top new educational tech tools in 2022. I wanted to share the content with my fellow classmates as it pertained to an upcoming group project we all shared. It was so nice to be able to share the article immediately on my Twitter feed along with our class hashtag to connect to my other classmates without having to leave the website I was on. I know this has been a possibility for awhile, but I suppose I have never had a real need to use it before now. I plan to use this feature much more in the future. 

Twitter is, for the most part, a user-friendly tool that has many features that make sharing and curating content simple and fast. From a professional viewpoint, I still am not sure how I could use Twitter on my elementary campus due to age restrictions and the maturity level of my students. I do not think it is an appropriate ed tech tool for this group demographic. However, I do see many ways it could be used in a professional manner between my colleagues and myself. We could create a school hashtag that could be used to share relevant articles, ideas, and research with each other about the best teaching practices and effective technology. Lists could be curated and shared that follow experts in the field that pertain to our school's objectives and goals or to follow political leaders that have a direct impact on the laws that affect public education. Twitter could be used as a way to garner feedback from each other on important school matters and decisions. Twitter is also a great way to connect families and build school camaraderie by making the community feel included in what is going on inside the school. 

Twitter and I have come a long way from our first introduction back in 2009. I believe Twitter and I are finally becoming friends after this week of exploration as I better appreciate what it can offer and bring to the table. While it isn't a tool that works in all educational situations, it definitely brings value to the table when used appropriately to foster collaboration and sharing of content.

Vanity Search Assignment

I approached my vanity search from four different viewpoints- searching while synced with my district Google account, searching as a guest user on Google, searching by videos, and searching by photos. 

The results I received from these searches were a mix of expected and unexpected findings. 

Currently, I am not an avid user of social media for personal reasons and as a result of articles and research I have done on the impact social media can have on mental health. However, I realize from my search results that my past use of social media was still very much accessible and "alive" on the web, and that other sources than myself had influence over my digital presence.

My first searches were focused on website results. I received similar results when both searching logged into Google and searching as a guest, yet the hierarchy of the results were a little different. I believe this is most likely due to certain filters enabled by my school district when I searched logged into my account. My YouTube, Pinterest, and teacher webpage were all part of the top results in both searches. These are sites I expected to show up in my digital footprint as I have used them all somewhat recently and frequently. It was eye-opening thinking from a work perspective how these three showed up together and the possible implications that could have if an employer, student, or parent decided to "Google" me. I use YouTube mostly as a professional resource to upload videos for my students, yet it also tracks anything I have watched for both personal and professional reasons. This is similar to my Pinterest account. While I use Pinterest to find teaching inspiration, I also use it for personal interests as well. Regardless, the pins and boards all populate together. It just reminds me of the care I need to take when using accounts for both professional and personal purposes, and I may need to consider making separate accounts for each. It isn't so much that what I am using these sites for personally is controversial or negative, but more that my personal beliefs, interests, tastes, bias, etc. do not necessarily need to be paired up next to my professional interests and philosophies. 

The search results that surprised me where links to websites I had not used in years or perhaps never, yet somehow I had an account. Linked In was one result I was not expecting because I do not remember ever signing up for this resource or using it. I did some digging around to see if I could figure out when the account was created, but was unsuccessful. My Twitter account also showed up as a top result despite the fact that I have not used it since 2014, and even then I only ever tweeted or retweeted a handful of times. A TikTok account I created during the pandemic also showed up as a top result. I found this to be strange since there was only one video ever created on it, and it was never used again. This was also true for a Spelling City account. 

Among the photos and videos, I found a very similar theme. Most were concerning infant swimming resource (ISR) lessons due to my advocacy of childhood drowning after my daughter tragically passed away in 2019. One of the webpage results from a news outlet also tied into this theme which made me realize how easy it is for others to find out personal details about a tragedy in my life. There were also photos from the obituaries of my daughter and grandmother, a blog post by my sister from 2011, a teacher appreciation award from 2016, and a Go Fund Me campaign that I donated to. 

There were three take-aways I had from this assignment. First, I realize that the majority of my digital footprint is made up from or tied to my profession as a teacher. Most of my social media usage is linked to teaching resources and ideas, and several photos populated from school events. Second, I was able to draw the conclusion that my digital footprint is considerably smaller than many. Perhaps so many older sources of information populated in the top results because there wasn't many results to begin with. Finally, I realized my digital footprint can be and is impacted by others and the ways they tag me or share information about me. My school website, my sister's blog, and news outlets all returned in my searches. While I was not the author of any of this content, they still contributed to my presence on the web.