In this video I'll be exploring why YouTube has become such a popular alternative to traditional
professional development and I'll also be digging into what we can learn from YouTube to improve
teacher training. My name is Sam Kary and this is my YouTube channel for The New EdTech Classroom.
In this presentation I'm going to be talking briefly about the use of YouTube as a medium
for reaching teachers and really becoming a new form of professional development for teachers,
or at least a growing form of professional development for teachers in the era of
distance learning. So I want to start us off here just by looking at some of the major channels
that are really directed at teachers and trying to teach teachers how to use technology programs,
and just look at the engagement that the channels are getting. So if we start off by looking at a
popular channel, Flipped Classroom Tutorials, that channel in the last year got around 18
million views. A channel like Teachers Tech got 34 million views. A channel that is not just about
technology integration, but very popular teachers for a variety of different teaching techniques,
particularly for elementary students, is Pocketful of Primary, and that channel got an astounding 44
million views in the previous year. Richard Burns' channel, which is about technology integration
specifically got 12 million views. And my channel which kind of pales in comparison to those numbers
got 4.5 million views in the previous year. So why are teachers watching YouTube videos to learn how
to teach with technology? First there's obviously a critical need, right, with school closures
there's just a practical need for people to learn how to teach with technology quickly
and I do think that there are certain elements of YouTube tutorials that made this kind of learning
more appealing. So one is that it's bite-sized learning, you can learn how to do something in a
relatively short period of time, we're talking 10, 15 minutes maximum. It's also self-paced learning,
so teachers can watch videos on their own and if they need to see how to do something again,
just rewind the video. It's also a visual medium, and it's a visual medium that models instruction
and also doesn't require a lot of additional time filling in gaps. So the purpose of the videos
is really to do that gap filling for teachers and teachers are basically able to turn right
around and put those practices into action. It also distills programs to their essence,
so rather than asking teachers to spend a lot of time digging around, playing around with programs,
which can be useful, but not everybody has the time to do that, teachers can see really the
critical components of a program and learn how to use those in a really quick period of time. And
then also teachers are able to target search for specific things they need, so those could be very,
very nuts and bolts specific topics that they might be looking for, like how to put a background
in Zoom, or how to force out make a copy for a Google Slide, and they can also explore tools
and strategies that they're not familiar with. So it's highly targeted, but also can give teachers
a window into different things that they might not have known about before. So I think there
are some key takeaways here that we can learn and apply to teacher professional development
in general. Similar to good teaching practice for students, some of our beliefs and principles
are sometimes hard to put into action. This one is also, I think, hard to put into action even
though we know it's true, and that's that adult learning should adhere to the same principles
of effective student learning. So we should focus on engagement with adults,
we should focus on visual learning as at least one modality that we should be really leaning on when
teaching teachers. Teacher instruction should be targeted and we should also be providing
opportunities for autonomy and self-directed learning. Teachers also benefit from direct,
concise, explicit instruction. I think lots of times we take more of a facilitator standpoint
in teacher instruction and really want teachers to do a lot of the heavy lifting on their own,
connect a lot of the dots on their own. That is great, I'm all for that, but sometimes there is
a need for teachers to see how to do something really quickly, and that gets me to my last
point and that's that I do very strongly believe that the success of the channels that we see out
there on YouTube is really a testament to the fact that teachers will integrate technology, they will
innovate and try new things if they don't have to spend a lot of time learning how to use a program
and they also don't have to spend a lot of time bridging the gap between a tech program and how it
can actually be used in the classroom. So I don't believe it's enough to just teach a teacher how
to use a program and then ask them to envision and imagine different ways to use it. There's
a time and a place for that. What we've really seen is that teachers also benefit greatly from
seeing some explicit examples of how it can be used in the classroom, and even better if they
can be given graphic organizers and templates and things like that, then they will turn right around
and they will implement those. And I think that's really starting to build a strong foundation
to lead to future exploration, innovation, excitement, enthusiasm for using technology in
more creative, more innovative ways that are maybe more personalized to that individual teacher.
I've been thinking a lot about this question about how to improve teacher professional development,
particularly for teachers that are already in the field but need to build new skills in things like
technology integration. So I've actually been working on building my own teacher training
platform called Collective Leap. It's going to launch mid-summer. You can learn more about it
by going to collectiveleapedu.com. So just some additional food for thought here. One is that
YouTube is a democratizing medium for teacher professional development. I love conferences, I
love reading books about education technology and pedagogy in general. However, those opportunities
are not necessarily available for everybody. Not everybody has the time to read a book, not
everybody has the money to attend a conference. YouTube is free, it's available for anybody,
anyone around the world can watch it. So you have teachers internationally that are learning these
different practices by watching this on YouTube and teachers who are just able to access this
information that was perhaps inaccessible to them before. Another aspect that I think is really
important to think about here is that it's not just about putting up videos on YouTube. There's
a huge difference between, say, recording a Loom video, Screencastify video, putting that up and
planning, recording, and then crucially, editing a video that's going to be effective. Creating
that kind of content is incredibly time intensive. So to do that, what I just mentioned: researching,
scripting, recording, and then editing, is a process that really at minimum is going to
take eight hours to create an effective video. And I think because of that the emphasis should
really be on supporting people with creating high quality content. It should be on creating
that high quality content, as opposed to kind of having everybody turn into a content creator.
So I don't think it's that practical for everybody to go out and record their own tutorials, and I
also don't think that that's entirely necessary. What we should be doing instead is really curating
that content, supporting those content creators, so that instructional coaches can spend their time
doing other things, doing coaching, not going out and making tutorials, and teachers can be spending
their time improving their practice and improving educational experiences for students. So all that
to say that i think YouTube is a very exciting medium for teaching teachers and I look forward
to seeing how it is going to continue to grow as a place where teachers are going to be able to
turn for some high quality instruction about how they can bring innovative educational technology
instruction practices into their classrooms. If you're interested in checking out some of
my other videos about teaching with technology, be sure to check out that playlist above. And if
you need some resources to help you get started with technology integration in your classroom,
click on the link in the video description, and you can get 20+ free resources when you
sign up for my weekly newsletter. Thanks again and I'll see you in the next video!