Since the beginning, I’ve been recording videos and posting them for Common Core math lessons on YouTube. I think I posted them on YouTube because it was easy, given that I had a gmail account, and because it is the most popular video sharing platform of all time. I didn’t give much thought to whether schools blocked or didn’t block it because my own school allowed students to access it and trained teachers how to create links to videos so that objectionable content wasn’t accessed.
Still, over the years, I’ve heard from a variety of teachers that their schools block YouTube and, hence, their students couldn’t access it during the school day. I kept looking around for different sites to host the videos as well as YouTube and settled on TeacherTube since it seems like schools generally do not block this site.
Over the coming month or so, I will be uploading all of the Common Core Algebra I and Algebra II videos to my channel on TeacherTube.
eMATHinstruction TeacherTube Channel
This is a long process. The videos themselves are each about one quarter gig, which means pretty darn large. They each take only about five minutes to upload, but then you need to title them, tag them, and (optional) index them to a Common Core Standard. That last one is a bit irritating because I can only add one standard, even if there are four or five tied to a given lesson. Oh well, everything has its shortcomings.
All told, I’m hopeful to be done uploading CC Alg I videos by around September 21st and CC Alg II videos by October 1st. I don’t know TeacherTube well enough yet to organize them in any great way. I hope to create a hyperlinked Table of Contents eventually that I will share on our site. The videos will remain on YouTube and the QR codes on the worksheets will remain linked to those videos. The same goes for the links on our site. At least for now. Time spent doing all of this is time not spent writing Geometry or Algebra add-ons, etcetera. But, I am glad that the videos will now be accessible to schools that block YouTube. Thanks to everyone who gave me the suggestion to do this.