One of the guiding questions we created for ourselves as we were planning this blog was maybe not so much a question, but more of a general curiosity about the availability of YouTube in Red Deer's schools.
The simple answer is that it varies from school to school. In my travels, I have spoken to some middle years teachers about this - it turns out they were wondering the same thing. One teacher said his (middle) school did not allow students access to YouTube but when he went to each of the three main high schools in Red Deer, access was available to all users of the school's wireless network. He was frustrated by this, pointing out that:
1. YouTube made great strides in its effort to 'clean up' the material available to users.
2. All students sign Internet User Agreement Contracts at the beginning of the school year which would hold them accountable for inappropriate use of sites such as YouTube.
3. Less dependable sites which are not blocked in the schools are being discovered by students as a replacement for YouTube.
4. Speaking from a purely speculative basis, perhaps the school's laptops would not take anywhere between 3 and 20 minutes to log in if the wireless resources were not being used to restrict access to the internet's most popular websites.
5. Even the principal may not know the answer as to why YouTube is not available in this school (the site of the conversation from which this information is derived).
Fortunately, any of the schools that do restrict YouTube access to students are more lenient with their teachers, all of whom are able to access YouTube to their heart's content. I take issue with this. This system sends a message that it is ok for a teacher to access a clip from Bill Nye the Science Guy to display a foolproof explanation of, let's say, clouds. A student in the library who is working on her cloud project is SOL. Wikipedia will have to do for her (if she's allowed to use Wikipedia, of course).
The message has been made pretty clear to us that we, as teachers of young adolescents, need to develop rapport and trust. We need to recognize students' interests and differentiate instruction accordingly blah blah blah; YouTube might, just might, be better at doing this than most teachers today. Just look at the Essentials of YouTube
Most of the qualities listed in some of the 'essential' information as described by YouTube add up an entity who could have a distinguishable relationship with any given user!! From an educational standpoint, YouTube could potentially take a student, who has reasonable levels of intrinsic motivation to learn, further than any teacher might be able to. Why? Simply put: because YouTube has more resources than the teacher does. And with a small amount of user cooperation, YouTube might be more clearly tuned in to a student's interests than a teacher (who likely has a relatively large number of students to keep track of).
I'm not suggesting that YouTube is a replacement for a human teacher. I am pointing out that YouTube has the capability to gain an understanding of what a student is interested in and take them further into that learning than a teacher left to his own devices.
Red Deer Public School District does have a district-wide policy regarding access to computing and information systems (document) but it leaves the specific details to its individual schools. A further check of sites specific to each middle school yielded little information about school-specific internet policy. This, to me, perpetuates the idea that a lot of schools in Red Deer and beyond do not allow access to YouTube because the site has been restricted for the last few years and no one ever managed to make it otherwise. Does anyone know whose job that is?
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