Have you checked to see if any of your music classes have made their way onto You Tube? You may be amazed at the number of music classes that have been recorded by students and posted onto this video sharing site. What would drive a student to do this? Is there a certain type of classroom culture that leads to this type of action or is it dependent on the individual student? Is it a malicious act? Do students even know that it is inappropriate, and possibly illegal? How would you deal with the situation of finding a video of your classroom posted online? I don’t intend to create a sense of paranoia but rather to raise a level of awareness that this activity may be happening in your own school or classroom.
Some of the music classroom videos that exist on You Tube are of performances, some of rehearsals. While several are quite disturbing, most simply capture typical antics of adolescents. A quick search on You Tube of music class or more specifically band class, orchestra class, chorus class or music theory class leads to a shockingly large number of videos. It is most likely that the music teacher in each case was unaware that a student was taping the class. A more specific search may lead to some surprises of your own. All it takes, after all, is a conveniently placed cell phone and a student with the desire, for whatever reason, to post the footage online. After viewing some of these videos, issues of surveillance, privacy, classroom management, and teaching could certainly be discussed.
Unknown recordings of your teaching, however are not the only kind that can take place in your classroom. When was the last time you taped your own teaching and watched it? What might you notice about your students and your own teaching? How can video footage, wanted and unwanted, lead to more reflective teaching? We might want to discuss the implications of both kinds since the student You Tube posting phenomenon does not seem to be ending any time soon.
I’m so glad you mentioned this Evan. We recently had a similar experience at my school where a child took a video during class time and posted it on YouTube. Our school blocks the site, but the students were all talking about it the next day. The video was discovered by the teacher and was immediately removed.
On the one hand, sites like YouTube give students empowering experiences and can be used for good – but as always, with the good comes that bad.
Wow! It’s good to know that your school dealt with the issue immediately. I’m sure this topic hits close to home to many people who might not yet realize it. A colleague and I were discussing these issues the other day and were trying to figure out if a You Tube post of a classroom situation is a conscious malicious act or if it has just become part of the technologically savvy student culture. I think that the phenomenon will probably also follow students to college just as the use of social networking systems like myspace, livejournal and facebook has. I like how you raise the issue of empowerment. It’s too bad that media education hasn’t played a larger role in schools to help students deal with the ethics of technology. I’ve accidentally come across several posts by college students, while searching for something unrelated on the internet, that make me wonder if the notion of privacy has deteriorated to the point that students don’t even think twice about broadcasting anything to the entire world wide web audience.
It’s frightening to think how a surveillance culture in our society is becoming part of our classrooms and I wonder how this might play a role in classroom environments.
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your post is helpful and informative