YouTube

YouTube is a sort of data bank where people can share their videos. In my opinion, the consequences of this tool are quite obvious:

- fourteen-year-old teenagers beat disabled children and put the video on the net.
- Everyone can make a video by using a mobile phone and can cause harm to somebody’s reputation. And what about privacy?

As you can see, I’m a little sceptical about this tool. Of course it can be useful for us, but its nature isn’t educational; I think that videos should be filtered in some ways.
Having said that, I think that YouTube could be a very useful tool for our English language learning. Here you are my observations:
- students can find English videos in order to improve their listening skills
- even students could prepare educational videos to share with other people
- teachers could prepare tutorial video to help not only their students but also the whole community
- in the future, teachers could run academic courses by sharing their videos in YouTube! (Do you think it’s possible?)

Personally I think that online education will be the future. Learning online is very different from a traditional classroom experience. It’s a “student-centred” process where the teacher is a sort of “moderator” that helps students to take part in the work and encourages them. In this picture of a possible future situation, multimedia and technological tools are fundamental. As I wrote before, YouTube could be exploited in many ways. In short, the word key in YouTube is “sharing” and this is the great potentiality we should exploit.

I’m looking forward to reading your replies
Stefania

p.s. I hope you enjoyed my video. It’s too funny!

Have fun!