Pedro MAYORAL
Key words: Significant Learning, Teaching Strategies, TIC.
SUMMARY
Since the origin of Internet (back to the 1960s), Science, Education, Commercialization and socialization have changed dramatically. As of 2009, an estimated quarter of Earth's population uses the services of the Internet. So we could say that there is no boundaries, no limits to get to know the different cultures in the world. Internet is the perfect path to promote the intercultural relationships. Under that idea and after analyzing all the possibilities to promote significant learning among these and the future generations, we found in YouTube an excellent site to do that, full of public sources to be used as teaching aids. The domain name “YouTube.com” was started on February 15, 2005. During the summer of 2006, YouTube was one of the fastest growing websites on the web and was ranked the 5th most popular website on Alexa. The website averages nearly 20 million visitors per month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. It is well known that over 100 million video clips are viewed daily on YouTube, with an additional 65,000 new videos uploaded every 24 hours. About the users, where around 44% are female, 56% male, and the 12- to 17-year-old age group is dominant. According to the website Hitwise.com, YouTube commands up to 64% of the UK online video market. Just Imagine the potential of all those videos, many teachers download YouTube videos at home to bring them to school and show their students. We want to share our experience using the site and the approach of YouTube Based Learning.
RESUMEN
Desde que la Internet fue desarrollada, (por los años 60s), tanto la ciencia como la educación y las formas de socializar han cambiado dramáticamente. Para el 2009 se estima que un cuarto de la población de la tierra usa la Internet. Se puede decir que no hay limites ni fronteras para conocer las diferentes culturas, Internet es el camino perfecto para propiciar las relaciones interculturales. Considerando lo anterior y después de analizar las distintas posibilidades para propiciar el aprendizaje significativo tanto en las actuales generaciones como en las futuras, encontramos en YouTube un sitio excelente para tal efecto, pues contiene una infinita cantidad de recursos públicos que podrían ser usados como material didáctico. “YouTube.com” inició el 15 de febrero de 2005, durante el verano del 2006, fue uno de los sitios de mayor crecimiento rankeandose en el 5º lugar de popularidad de acuerdo con Alexa.com. El sitio registra un promedio de 20 millones de visitantes por mes según Nielsen/NetRatings, mas de 100 millones de video clips son vistos diariamente en YouTube, adicionalmente 65,000 nuevos videos son subidos cada 24 horas, el 44% de usuarios son mujeres y el 56% hombres, el grupo dominante lo representan jóvenes entre los 12 y 17 años de edad. De acuerdo con Hitwise.com YouTube lidera mas del 64% del mercado de videos en línea en el Reino Unido. Imaginemos el potencial que tese material posee. Muchos profesores de todos los niveles educativos, descargan videos en casa y los llevan a sus aulas para ser usados en clase. Lo que nosotros queremos es compartir nuestra experiencia con el uso de videos de Youtube y lo que consideramos un acercamiento pedagógico al que llamamos Aprendizaje Basado en YouTube.
1. INTRODUCTION
To survey (to inspect carefully) the education land, is not an easy job. To determine the boundaries of the different areas of the educational field, by means of measuring the angles and distances, where does the teaching strategies begin or end and where does the learning take place. To identify when we are being the traditional providers of knowledge or the facilitators of learning requires a deep self-analysis of our daily professional practice. Being up to date on what is popular for our students is one of the best ways to get their attention and to facilitate possibilities to construct with others, strong learning and give significance to what they do during the process.
YouTube and other video clip sites have become very popular - especially with young adults. These sites also provide English learners and classes with a new tool to improve listening skills. The real advantage to these sites - at least from a language-learning point of view - is that they offer authentic examples of everyday English used by everyday people. Of course, this is the challenge as well, students may enjoy watching these clips; but poor sound quality, pronunciation and slang can make these short videos even more difficult to understand. By creating context for these short videos you can help your students explore a world of online English learning possibilities. And if the source can do that for a teaching languages experience we are plenty sure that can produce the same effect on students from the different areas, including surveyors.
For and from teachers all over the world, in almost every known language, from different cultures; videos in color, or black and white, for education, history, arts, science or entertainment, with music or without it, homemade or professional, documentary, trailers, TV shows, series, shortcuts, plays, concerts, karaoke, humor, parody and more. There are hundreds of categories thousands of possibilities, million of options. That is what you can find at YouTube.
It is well known that using technology in the classroom provides students with plenty of possibilities to build strong learning, audiovisual aids are great sources to get students attention and to involve them in a perfect atmosphere to promote significant learning, but what do we mean by significant learning? Simply the kind of experiences we identify as “the right things” that need to be learnt, those aspects that have an impact on people’s everyday life, and YouTube is full of those real life experiences. If we hope to craft a more meaningful way of educating students, then, teachers will need to find a new and better way of teaching, focusing on the quality of students learning, that means, to move from a content-centered learning to a learning-centered approach to teaching.
Our search for better ideas on teaching began a few years ago when we joined the academic faculty, wondering what would be the characteristics of a good teaching course and trying to explore different methodologies to facilitate the meaningful learning, we went through traditional but successful teaching practices to modern, constructivist and innovative methodologies. We explored them incorporating technology, face to face and online, but the best was using public sources like the YouTube videos and as we found, using the site in teaching was a very common practice.
There are many sites where you can find videos to be used as teaching aids, Discovery Online, National Geographic, BBC, Google, Yahoo among others, but YouTube is the first option for most of the teachers, there is even a TeachersTube, a website with a similar structure but not with the same impact in the audience. YouTube have no equals, and we do not pretend to promote the use of the website just like that, you should consider the copyright matters and the intellectual rights of the different creators, artists or amateur owners of the videos.
Using YouTube in the classroom can be applied in different educational contexts, from early stimulation to university level, in our experience, the structure of the curricula is basically organized to develop in our students teaching languages skills, by the end of their professional training, they will have the chance to choose from three different areas: teaching Spanish, French or English as a second or Foreign Language. There are specific subjects in the curricula related to teaching languages to different ages and levels and we have found that using video gives them positive results and in the different contexts in which videos were implemented, they succeed.
You do not have to be an excellent lecturer or the best organized teacher, all what you need is to care about your students’ learning processes, you have to believe that including significant materials in your lessons, you are facilitating students to significant kinds of learning. Interaction will also be a key word in your performance and interacting well, will give you better opportunities to do your job. Using a video for whatever topic you do, will demand from you a great feedback system, as well as, a great assessment criteria and grading when needed.
2. CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT
Most of our classrooms include technological equipment, well at least in México they do, if not, all what you need as we said before, is to distribute properly time and space to generate a nice atmosphere in the classroom. We suggest arranging the classroom in a way that everyone in the class can get the best perspective of the screen. When working for specific purposes such as the realization of a special work related to de video, whether it is written or creative, they should know what you expect from them to do after the video presentation. There are not special requirement when watching videos but to ensure that everyone in the class will be able to have the full view of the area. Teacher should provide with information about the video, give the proper credits to the authors and give the task requirements when needed. Most of our experiences, using video in the classroom had shown that students enjoy and learn the video lessons better when the video itself include a touch of humor, mystery or rhythms.
3. TEACHERS’ AND STUDENTS’ ROLE
Nowadays teachers’ roles should be, or should I say, “Must be” as facilitators of learning, and such responsibility demands from us, as teachers, the flexibility and creativity to give an extra effort in providing students with a wide variety of possibilities to build strong learning by their own. Using technology seems to be the best path to do so.
As facilitators, teachers have the responsibility to encourage students through the different options and some of those options have already being thought by many other teachers in the world and even better, many of them considered their job as a possibility to help other teachers and decided to upload their videotaped experiences to different sites, one of them is YouTube.
On the other hand, students’ roles must include as basic characteristics the following: autonomy, critical thinking, and the possibility to work with others (cooperative work). What we understand by these three characteristics, defines a student profile where the autonomy is the ability to generate self-knowledge.
4. STRATEGIES FOR THE DIFFERENT LEVELS
I will provide with a brief introduction to the following levels just to give the basic ideas on how to use the video for them and will focus my suggestions on what is important to our field, teaching adults.
4.1 For Early Stimulation, Preschoolers and Kindergarten
Since we consider the potential of using video to teach different subjects, of course we considered the possibility to use it as an early stimulation resource, and it really worked. What we did was to search for “nursery rhymes” and this is what we found (see the picture below), 13700 videos, some of them are repeated but we took videos according to their teaching potential and quality, we found stories, songs, TV programs, videos made by teachers and original productions. We used some of them with kids from one to five years old, we applied them according to the curricula contents, we used videos such as “London Bridge is falling down” “Mary had a Little Lamb” etc. and we observed students responses, as well as, we assessed students’ acquisition of language and their skills development, those results will be presented in a special paper and in a different forum.
4.2 Elementary School
We did a similar procedure for the elementary level and we found amazing results, the level was divided according to Mexico’s educational organization, which is organized according to the kids ages, from 6 to 9 years old corresponding to what is identified as the elementary lower level, and from 10 to 13 years old to the upper elementary level. The search for videos was focused on the four skills, listening, speaking, reading and writing, so the contents of the curricula gave us a wide variety of possibilities, from the search of listening comprehension skills to the search of science projects and the application of those videos, gave classes a very interactive and cooperative perspective, since most of the students had to watch, plan, and put in practice the projects. The most popular videos for this level were the ones related to the science projects, video songs for kids, and cartoon short videos. In a questionnaire applied at the end of the observation period, they answered that they loved to watch the sciences videos and to experiment with classmates at the time they watched them.
Picture 2: search “science project” http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=science+projects&search_type=&aq=f
4.3 Junior high
Teaching teenagers is a matter of special attention, most of teachers of this level suffer because students of these ages, from 13 to 16 most of the time are involved in their personal growing affairs, the most important discovering we made was that using videos, students brought into the classroom after specific homework, gave the class a nice and friendly working atmosphere, teachers looked for the same videos and the results from comparing students choices to the ones made by teachers showed that teachers are not even close from what students consider as interesting choice, for example: students were asked to bring or search YouTube for a video related to the DNA, teacher choose a 7:45 minutes video (See the picture 3), the one with a scientific explanation of the DNA theory. Students brought different versions and some of them chose same videos but none of them chose the one the teacher had chosen. Similar situations happened with other homework, according to a questionnaire about their favorite videos and lessons, the music video classes where those when they practiced listening comprehension using music video followed by those when they watch video documentaries about artists, singers and movie trailers.
Picture 3: Video chosen from 70,000 options, searching key word: “DNA”
4.4 High School
Teaching subjects in high school gets even better, specially when using video for whatever reason teachers’ need: language skills, scientific matters, technical and technological contents and even more, most of them can be addressed using YouTube resources. For this level, the best teaching experiences happened when teachers used karaoke videos as a complement of their languages classes, they used similar strategies as in Junior high, asking students to bring a video or a link of their favorite song to review specific language topics. As you can see in figure 4, there are 660,000 videos for the “karaoke” key word, and using karaoke will give students the possibility to practice not only listening skills but reading at the time they practice common vocabulary, contractions, and speed and rhythm of oral production.
Picture 4: searching for “karaoke”
4.5 College/T.A.F.E.
In México the closest or the most similar level known as college or T.A.F.E. in Australia, is known as “professional technician”, but it is not an educational option anymore, at least not for the University of Colima, due to, since august 2009 this option disappeared from the list of educational options offered by the university. We had had the chance to explore the use of video in such level. We must say that at this level, students can get a diploma or a certificate in a specific field, as most of those programs, they were planned to be completed in a 2 years period of study, that is not enough to get the BA degree but students have the chance to obtain the grade after 2 years of study, well, for this level, YouTube also has options and we observed the use of video in a tourism school, the last survivor of all the professional technicians’ programs, and teachers used video to show students the world’s most interesting places to visit, to learn about the world’s attractions and for cooking recipes from different regions of the world as well as for Mexico’s main touristic areas. Other sources they used where related to the sustainable tourism, preparing beverages, in the image shown bellow are the obtained options for both searches. As for the other levels, some of the videos are not exactly related to what was expected, in that case are the students’ or teachers’ criteria what guides to take the best option. Students watched the videos, and used them as a reference point for further investigation or for specific practices.
Picture 5: search for sustainable tourism, 2,820 possibilities
Picture 6: search for making cocktails, 7,630 possibilities
4.6 University
Research by Herron, Hanley and Cole (1995) indicates that the visual support in the form of descriptive pictures significantly improved comprehension scores with language videos for English speaking students learning French. The results of the study indicate that extensive listening is facilitated by the richness of the context that visual organizers, such as educational videos, provide. Herron (1994) finds that advanced organizers based on videos helped learners improve comprehension and aid in the retention of information.
At the school of languages we used videos from YouTube to support or complement different areas of the curricula, to teach Spanish as a foreign language as well as French. To enrich the English program and we even developed different projects where students had to produce different type of video productions and to upload them to YouTube. They made documentary, soap operas, video remaking, advertising, humor, etc.
A recent large-scale survey by Canning-Wilson (2000) suggests that the students like to learn language through the use of videos. One of the results of her survey shows that learners prefer action/entertainment films than language films or documentaries in the classroom. She states although these films may seem to hold student interest, she believes that it could be inferred that student comprehension of the video may be due to the visual clues instead of the auditory components.
In our experience, we use the YouTube platform in two main ways, as a site with plenty of possibilities for our students to explore the world through the eyes of other video producers, and also, as a platform where our students can share with the rest of the world what they are able to do with a camera and a friendly video editing software. They do not need a hard training program to do that; most of them are technology and Internet natural users, so a few advice and guidance are enough to encourage them to produce nice educational video productions, considering Canning –Wilson conclusions about giving as much visual clues as possible to make users of their videos, the comprehension process becomes easier and friendlier.
To avoid problems with copyright or other legal stuff, our students were asked to give the proper credits to others video productions, we also made a written agreement were students authorized the teachers to publish their productions in a special channel at YouTube. The topics may vary according to the different subjects and the most representative of them are, video songs for kids, video to be used as listening comprehension and most of them are their own version of famous movies or music videos, soap opera chapters, original Mexican series, but using the English language, news shows, etc. Some of them even made picture-by-picture animation.
4.6.1 YouTube for Surveyors
We must say that as teachers of languages we hardly understand about surveying and spatial sciences, but then again we can use YouTube to find out the answers to our questions and searching for “surveying” we found that 45,500 videos were related to the term and many of them were very illustrative (see picture 7).
We did the same for “Geosciences” “Geology” “surveyors” “spatial sciences” and many other terms such as “Cadastral Surveying” “Engineering Surveying” “Hydrographic” “Mining” “Geographic Information Systems” “Photogrammetric” “Remote Sensing” “Geodesy” and “Land Information”. All of the results provided us with similar results.
Picture 8: “Cadastral Surveying”
Picture 9: “Cadastral”
We even found complete lectures about surveying just by typing it in the searching area, 318 related videos were found and some of them are longer from what they are supposed to be, according to the site specifications videos should not be longer than 10 minutes and these lecture videos are longer than an hour as shown in picture 10.
Picture 10: “Surveying Lecture”
5. CONCLUSIONS
We must conclude that if we, teachers of languages, were able to learn about surveying and many contents about surveying, such as: “Since the beginning of recorded history, people had needed to measure and map their world. Surveyors are the professional experts in land measurement, information and management”. “Cadastral Surveyors define boundaries when land is subdivided, bought or sold. They often undertake project management, design and approval processes related to land development and if someone wants to build a new house, surveyors will mark out the boundaries, also that modern surveyors help police at crime scenes, they predict earthquakes, they use computer imaging and satellites to monitor environmental change, they map the ocean floor”. And much more, everything from the different videos we watched in the process to enrich the original study that was mainly focused on teaching languages.
We also observed teachers from other areas such as Politics, Economics, Philosophy, Psychology, Technology and Health Sciences, we discussed with users of YouTube about the strategies they use to implement the video, as well as, the ways they assess or provide with feedback to their students and we found really interesting answers, the most significant is that most of the teachers enjoy when students are quietly watching the videos or moving at the tune the video plays.
We have no more to say, but we want to extend an invitation to try a source like YouTube, to explore this potential by yourself and to enrich your students learning experiences by exploring through this media, what other people is producing in your area, to video register their own surveying experiences and to contribute with their experience to make new generations learn from them. There are no boundaries but their imagination, as teachers we need to explore Internet and use it appropriately, what we have been allowed to use. Our students deserve better teaching strategies, more significant experiences and autonomy to generate strong and long lasting learning.
REFERENCES
Gilbert G. Nigel, 1978. A Simulation Approach to Teaching Survey Sampling, American Sociological Association.
Canning, C., "Visual support and language teaching", TESOL Arabia News, Volume 5:4, (1998): 3-4
Canning, C.,"Maximizing the effect of visuals in software programs" EMCEE, 4:3, (1998): 7-8.
Canning, C., "Educational Applications for information technology: re-evaluating computer aided instruction in the classroom", EMCEE, 4:3, (1998). 3-4
Canning, C. "Theoretical use of Visuals". In Canning, C. and Koester, J., Illustrated Visual Aids for Academic English, 1:1, (1997): 2-4
Canning-Wilson, C., Research in Visuals, Invited Paper for the Video Special Interest Group at the International TESOL Arabia 2000 Conference, Hilton Ballroom, Hilton Hotel, April 12-14, 2000.
Canning-Wilson, C., "Role of Video in the F/SL Classroom", (2000): 69-76. In S. Riley, S Troudi and C. Coombe. (ed.) Teaching, Learning and Technology, TESOL Arabia 1999 Conference Proceedings, TESOL Arabia 1999 Conference March 8-10, 1999.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Pedro José Mayoral Valdivia
Master in Sciences in Technology and Education from the University of Colima, Certificate for Teachers from the Anglo Institute, Certificate in SCL and TEYL from Exeter UK. 22 years teaching languages. Previous conferences: CELE, TESOL NY2008, PBL CHINA. Currently he is professor of Educational Psychology and TEYL at the UCol.
Alejandro Silvestre Tello Moreno
Master in Education from Exeter University UK, College in English Language from the University of Colima. Teacher of Languages since 1993. Currently he is deputy headteacher at the School of Languages, and teaches subjects such as Linguistics, Phonology and Teaching Observation.
José Manuel Gonzalez Freire
Doctorate in Philology, Master in Human Resources, College in Hispanic Philology from Universidad Complutense, Spain. Full Time Professor at the School of languages since 2002, recognized profile from SEP and as researcher from the SNI, coordinator of the DELE (International Spanish Exams). International speaker and writer of books and articles.
CONTACTS
MSc. Pedro Mayoral
University of Colima
Ave. Universidad 333, Col. Las Viboras
Colima, Colima
Mexico
Tel. +52 3123161179
Fax + 52 3123161179
Email: pmayoral@ucol.mx, pett30@gmail.com
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