doceri.com
Are you a teacher, either K-12 or university faculty, who uploads lesson videos to YouTube for your students to view?
Whether you’re flipping your classroom or providing screencast reviews, using YouTube is a great choice because you can easily manage your videos, your students can easily access it, and the general public can easily search its database.
Why is the ability to search important?
Because the work you create is important, and it can enhance the learning of a great many more students than you will meet in your classroom. With more than 800 million unique views per month, YouTube is becoming a default ‘how to’ search engine. We’ve come to expect that when we want to learn how to do something by example, a search of YouTube will likely return the result we need.
Here are our Top Three reasons you should be tagging your educational videos:
1. Students outside your immediate teaching spectrum can find and learn from your videos.
For university faculty, this is an obvious way to disseminate and create a following for your work, and your university. For K-12 teachers, making your work easy to find increases the number of students you can reach with your gift of teaching.
2. Other educators can find and learn from your examples.
Flipped learning is taking education by storm because it works. Every day, more teachers are looking for examples for how to flip their classrooms with teaching videos. When you tag your YouTube videos, you are contributing to the larger body of pedagogical knowledge on teaching in your area.
3. Related videos will be relevant to your subject.
YouTube is a double-edged sword. When you assign your flipped learning videos to your students on YouTube, there is always the danger of enticing but irrelevant videos to distract them. However, when you tag your videos with education and subject matter tags, irrelevant videos will be replaced with appropriate, related videos in the right hand column.
More than 4,000 videos with the Doceri tag have been uploaded to YouTube for public viewing since late last summer when SP Controls released its new version of Doceri, the iPad-based screencast, remote control and whiteboard app. Dozens more videos are uploaded every day. We set this default tag for videos uploaded from within the app so that other users can find your videos when they search on “Doceri.”
Try searching on Doceri in the YouTube search bar – you can refine your search by using the filter button. For example, look at recent uploads, or add further search terms such as your content area (e.g., math). Together, we can create a much needed resource of information. Crowd sourcing will help us create this data base faster than any one person can do alone.
UPDATE June 17, 2013: Unfortunately, since Google’s new YouTube OneChannel redesign, the YouTube search function does not return absolute results. Recent uploads, for example, won’t necessarily show you all videos tagged with Doceri – and it may show you other similar videos.
To make your videos even more valuable for the greater community, here are some additional tips and some specifics on tagging.
| Title | The title of an educational video should include a short description of the content of the video. Include your name in the titles of your videos so that your followers and future fans can easily find you. |
| Description | In the description section, provide a more detailed description of the content of the video. Include comments on the intended uses of the video and how it fits into a larger course or body of content. If you have another web page that relates to the video, you can add a hyperlink in this description section. Consider using a link near the beginning of your description so that users can click it without opening the full description. If you use music, photos, or any other sourced materials in your videos, include references to this content. |
| Tags | You should use tags to help identify the key words that describe your video. You should certainly include the subject area (e.g., “math” or “solving linear equations”), and you might include the grade level (e.g., “grade eight”). Including your school name and department is a good idea as well, especially for university faculty.If you’re uploading a video from within the Doceri app, you can edit and add to your tags later when you are logged into your YouTube account. The following keywords are suggested as tags for Doceri videos with educational content: Teach, Learn, How to, Tutorial, Instruct, Lesson, Education, Pencast, Screencast |
It’s Your Material, and Your Choice
Many teachers are wary of software and apps that require the video screencasts that are created to be hosted on a proprietary web site for viewing. We agree: If it’s your content, you should be able to share it as you like.
When you create with Doceri, nobody owns your content but you. Share your videos as you like: Easily upload them to YouTube or Facebook, send them in emails, or share them in other ways public or private.
When it comes to YouTube, you can list your videos as public or private. You can also un-list them on YouTube while simultaneously using the link (or embed code) to post them on your school’s LMS or your own web site. With Doceri, that the choice is yours.
