YouTube is a free online video sharing resource. Its popularity often stems from viral marketing of silly or outrageous videos, but it can actually be used as a powerful tool for education.
Many of our students are part of what is called the "Look at Me" generation - as evidenced by their participation on MySpace and Facebook, they enjoy sharing information about themselves. Why not leverage this interest and ask students to share with the world what they have learned via a video portfolio? As a doctoral student at Pepperdine University, I was asked to create a video to document myself learning something new, and to narrate the video explaining the learning process based on emerging models of how people learn. I had a wonderful time creating the video, and found it to be a much more powerful experience than simply writing a paper. You can view the video presentation here: http://youtube.com/watch?v=gJhk-W58GXA
YouTube can also be used to post instructional videos to allow students to review at their own pace concepts that they find particularly difficult. I'm starting to post videos of some difficult grammatical concepts in Spanish to support both my face-to-face and my online students: http://youtube.com/watch?v=DKly8qxZwKw
Finally, you don't have to create your own videos to make use of YouTube. There is already a tremendous wealth of video content posted on YouTube that can be used for class discussion. Walt, for example, often uses clips from the movie Twelve O'Clock High in a leadership course that he teaches. He was pleased to find this clip online to share with his students: http://youtube.com/watch?v=mcwWCKU6ZT0
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