YouTube's new Creative Commons remix feature in its video editor!

This is amazingly good news for education:


Students will be able to make their own videos and create mashups with documentary video from reliable sources such as C-SPAN, Voice of America and Al-Jazeera. 

Additionally, users will be able  to publish any of their own videos under CC-BY simply by selecting the licenses as an option during the upload process. CC is hugely successful for Flickr images; YouTube's adoption of creative remix has huge potential for students' multimedia projects.
Read more here. 
We are fortunate at New Trier that YouTube is not blocked for students and that they can make use of this fabulous resource more fully.

YouTube Statistics for those at New Trier Awaiting the Unblocking of YouTube

Today, Mashable reports: 

"As of February 2011, YouTube has 490 million unique users worldwide per month, who rack up an estimated 92 billion page views each month. We spend around 2.9 billion hours on YouTube in a month — over 325,000 years. And those stats are just for the main YouTube website — they don’t incorporate embedded videos or video watched on mobile devices."

Social media statistics are equally impressive:

YouTube reports: "there are more than 400 tweets per minute containing a YouTube link. Meanwhile, over on Facebook over 150 years worth of YouTube videos are watched every single day."

 Not surprising, 20-to-35-year-old bloggers embed most of the videos (57%), followed by teenagers (20%) and bloggers over 35 (20%).” See ReadWrite Web.


Most tech saavy teachers are working to get valuable YouTube content into their schools. View Steve Dembo's impressive presentation on Digital Storytelling with YouTube. It is a compelling argument for reforming our approach to YouTube. Most school blocking is apparently useless and outdated for today's sophisticated teenager who can easily download a software to their flash drive, bring it to school, and get any blocked site they wish.

A Cool New YouTube editing tool -sharing only the best part

Do you have a presentation in which you only want to show a minute of a much longer video?

A new tool in beta has just the solution for you. This tool would also work well for those film makers making mashups or video collages.

And they are crowdsourcing the snips so that you can search for those video snips most watched and favorited.
1) just enter your URL at http://snipsnip.it/

Set the start and ending times.

2) your SNIP will appear below

3) your embed HTML code(for your site or blog)

& snipped link will pop up below.

If you would like a link to your snip URL,
please use your Firefox or Chrome browser.
Happy Snipping! Below I am embedding a 30 second clip of Iraq War Footage from a Fallujah battle.

cropped with SnipSnip

Had a bit of trouble with the embed code and manually ended the "clip timing" in the code...but other than that, it works great.

A Whole New Way to Get Colleges' Attention: The YouTube Application

College applications are no longer all about essay questions and SAT scores.

Posting video applications to YouTube to try and capture attention seems like a risky way to go, especially if it's your top college choice. This didn't stop these ambitious high school seniors.

What do you think of this new approach?

Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir - 'Lux Aurumque'

Read Eric's blog to find out how he accomplished this!

Steve Dembo's Presentation on Storytelling with YouTube

One thing I learned was the definite difference between a "Mashup" and a "remix". The former combines two different pieces of content; the latter is a transformation of a single video with either a changed soundtrack to change the message or other editing which completely transforms the work.

Enjoy Dembo's Prezi:

Storytelling for the YouTube Generation on Prezi

By the way, all the good presenters were using Prezi!

When YouTube is blocked ( 14 ways around it!)

Back in December, 2008, librarian Joyce Valenza wrote in School Library Journal's Never Ending Search blog about 8 ways to bypass the commonplace YouTube blocking at schools. This post has been the most frequently commented upon of all her blog posts and now she has added 6 more tools to accomplish the bypass.

I think that speaks to value of allowing students access to YouTube at school. At New Trier, the good news is that teachers are not blocked but the bad news is that students are still prohibited from searching YouTube. This is basically nonsensical since our students have found work arounds not only to access YouTube blocking but also to get to social networking sites such as Facebook. Is anyone paying attention?
Educators need to learn about and spend time teaching students appropriate use of social networking tools. Let's not waste time blocking access. No one can keep up with all the wonderful tools available. Not even me:) Not even during summer vacation!

YouTube Channel at the Library of Congress

The Library of Congress is trying to “do YouTube right.” They are now "the stewards of the world’s largest collection of audiovisual materials" (some 6 million films, broadcasts and sound recordings), and have created their own YouTube channel which has now gone public.
They are staring with a limited number of 70 videos, arranged in the following playlists: 2008 National Book Festival author presentations, the Books and Beyond author series, Journeys and Crossings (a series of curator discussions), “Westinghouse” industrial films from 1904, scholar discussions from the John W. Kluge Center, and the earliest movies made by Thomas Edison, including the first moving image ever made. One of the Library’s stated missions is to 'preserve a universal collection of knowledge and creativity for future generations'. The new YouTube channel certainly accomplishes this mission.

Angry Librarian

Makes you want to scream!