My Brain Hurts

Many are of the opinion that YouTube is just bunch of adolescents putting up goofy videos of themselves doing stupid things, well it does has that but it has a lot of valuable educational resources as well. One example if social history recorded by ordinary people. Take any newsworthy event that you plan to cover with your class and there will probably be something there, an example of that is the numerous Tsunami videos. Many are poor quality taken with phones but they are graphic portrayals of human reactions to this event, the images and recorded voices give an interesting insight into what it was like to actually be there.

Obviously viewing live in class is the first option but many narrow minded people in power block YouTube from School network use. However all is not lost, there are a few twists along the way but it’s a fairly simple process to download these files so you can use them with your classs. A Google search on “download from YouTube” will produce many options. My favoutites are these two:

Vixy (http://vixy.net) – open the YouTube page with the video you want. Open vixy.net and copy the URL into the required space. Select one of the five target video formats available and away you go.

TechCrunch (http://www.techcrunch.com/get-youtube-movie) – open the YouTube page with the video you want. Open TechCrunch and copy the URL into the required space and away you go. The file is downloaded in the original flv format use by YouTube. You can view the file with a player such as VLC but I prefer to convert it to an mpeg using iSquint (http://www.isquint.org). This process does have an extra step but I think the final result is a better quality file.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2007 at 7:49 pm and is filed under ICTPD, Web Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.