Article:  TeacherTube vs YouTube

Harry Grover Tuttle

Will TeacherTube topple YouTube as the teachers' favorite source for educational videos? Or will YouTube remain the perennial favorite?  By comparing the similarities and differences, educators can decide which best serves their educational needs.

Teacher tube provides a vehicle for videos specifically for education. After an English educator types in the search term such as A Midsummer Nights Dream, the instructor can  refine the search by level such as “Middle School” or “Math”. Underneath, the refine search area,  the actual videos are listed.The listing is a word listing; the searcher does not see what the actual video looks like. TeacherTube does not indicate how many videos there are; the only clue is the number of pages (three) with about ten listings on each page or about thirty videos for this search. Some videos have descriptions such as  or “This is a two-minute summary of Act I scene i of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Nights Dream”  or “A modern summery of A Midsummer Nights Dream. A sophomore class retells Shakespeares romantic.”  However, on the first page only half of the videos had a description.  If an educator clicks on various links such as TeacherTube Search – midsummer., or TeacherTube Search – modern,  then an additional list appears. This reviewer would have preferred that the link goes directly to one video.  The tags generally offer very little information as to the actual content of the video with words such as  “”High School, Reading, Fine Arts, Math, Science”,   Although these words do limit the video to high school writing,a full search is lacking. The length of videos generally seems to be about two-three plus minutes although there are some nine plus minute videos. TeacherTube includes many class or small group  videos.  No looked-at video had any comments.

TeacherTube does have different categories such as  major tabs such as “Channels” or “Groups” and minor tabs such as “Most recent”, “Most viewed”, “Most discussed”, “Top Favorites”, “Top Rated” , “Recently Featured”, and “Random” Almost all of the groups only had one person in them.  In searching for Math in the groups, of the twenty groups on the page, none has videos. Many of the groups have about one to sixteen members in the group but there is virtually no discussion in the forums except for an original posting. In the channels are videos groupings plus the partners of Health Channel, American Institute of History Education, Adora's Flying Finger Channel,  2009 World Math Day Video Challenge, and Heroes in American History, and Texas Instruments' Real World Math Contest.

On the other hand, YouTube is not specific to education.  If an educator searches for the same term,  A Midsummer Nights Dream, she finds about 2, 300 videos.  She can use the Advance Options to refine her search more such as “high school” which returns one hundred forty eight videos or to eliminate music videos.; the visual results are displayed under the search.  If she just searches for the play without any limits, she finds clips from movies, cartoon, student productions, and amateur productions.  The searcher sees a picture of the video clip along with the length of the video, the description, number of stars (rating), how long the video has posted, number of views, and  author. When the teacher clicks on a link, she goes directly to the video. There are no apparent tags. For A Midsummer Nights Dream, the length of videos generally seems to be about five to eight minutes although there are numerous much long videos.

Like TeacherTube, YouTube has “Channels” and “Community”. The channels are the major categories of video such as “Comedy”, “Entertainment”, “HowTo & Style”, and many more including “Education”. This site's “Community” consists of such topics as “Contests”, “Events” and “Groups”. Unfortunately, the groups cannot be searched.

Based on this comparison, teachers will want to go to YouTube for educational videos due to its  easy of searching, visual image of the video, wealth of videos, consistent use of descriptions, and  variety of people (professionals to public school students) who make the videos. The teachers might want to install a program like Media Converter on their home computer so that they can download the videos in case their school blocks YouTube or if their school has a slow connection. 

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