YouTube

YouTube is great for sharing videos, but of course you can't access it at school. I went looking at its policies and found a page of terms and conditions that you are agreeing to by "using andor visiting" the website. When I copied and pasted the text into Word, it came to 11 pages and 3914 words! I intended to summarise the main points for you but it was just too hard! You can look at the page yourself at home!

Instead, I found YouTube's Community Guidelines and saved them in iNet > ICT > Year 11-12 >CCC Problem. This webpage goes onto two Word pages and is only 745 words long. And it gives us eight guidelines that are easy to summarise and understand. I suggest using these as the YouTube Community Code of Practice. These guidelines are a good place to start when thinking about the standards that the Christchurch City Council is likely to set.

Happy Birthday to the Library!

Christchurch's Public Library is turning 150 this year!
There is a website especially for this event.
As part of the celebrations they are running a competition, asking people to make a 1-3 minute video about the library and upload it to YouTube. The information on the competition page gives some guidelines which are also relevant to our Rugby World Cup video project and may be useful for developing codes of practice.

Videos for YouTube

What makes a video popular?

I read an article in Canterbury that talks about a lecturer at Canterbury University who has put some teaching videos onto YouTube. You can see her videos here. She has used some creative techniques to keep people interested. In the article I read, she is quoted as saying

• "Some of the other YouTube videos in this subject area are quite painful to watch."
• "I wanted to make mine a lot more entertaining and it helped that my son has the creative talent to do that."

Her clips include

• her son's drawings
• anime images
• a dose of humour
• a character, Helen
• voice-overs

She says that keeping the action and narration fast is important, and aims to keep the videos short.