#ETT Google Reflection

On Friday, 27 February 2015, I had the opportunity to take a tour of the Google Headquarters in Cambridge, MA as part of a fun-filled day of workshops sponsored by EdTechTeacher.org, in collaboration with Google.  I left feeling inspired, imagining how schools might find ways to carve out the creative space that makes Google such an invigorating and innovative place.

My favorite workshop, Choose Your Adventure YouTube, was taught by Greg Kulowiec, a former Social Studies teacher.  The basic concept of his presentation was that YouTube can be used as a creative and collaborative tool for students to tell a variety of stories, increasing their engagement and buy in, while having an authentic audience.

So far, I've experimented with this idea, using footage of the musical hat that I made for the event, but I didn't leave quite enough wait time on the first clip.  If you are fast, clicking on the link within the video will take you to another video clip.  Doing something like this with students, for an authentic purpose, would be a fun way to bring more video making to the classroom!

Here are some of the biggest aha's that I took away:

• YouTube Capture is a useful app for capturing footage and quickly uploading it to YouTube.

• Breaking students up into groups is a good idea.  They can each work on a different component of the video and then add their FINAL video clips to a shared folder in Google Drive.

• You can give your students a special email address for mobile uploads that allows them to send video footage directly to your desired YouTube Channel, by going into the settings and mobile uploads. You can change this address to control when clips are uploaded to your account by clicking the link under the special email address.  (See the example below.)

• In the video, itself, you can only link to other videos (or Google+ profiles), not directly to documents. It is, however, a good idea to put a link to sources or additional information within the description of the video.