Thursday, December 5, 2013

Youtube a Physics Teachers Best Friend

Being a physics teacher can be extremely complicating.  Many times the teacher needs to focus on advanced mathematics while also being able to explain abstract concepts.  It is not an easy job to constantly be able to do both.  Many times to help students understand and relate to abstract concepts the teacher would need to show demonstrations to help students learn.  However with youtube there are an unlimited amount of physics demonstrations that can be shown and explained.  This makes it easy to access videos to find a demonstration for almost any concept in physics.
This helps teachers to save a lot of time not having to set up demonstrations, and to create demonstrations.  Also many times schools do not have the best materials to properly show demonstrations.  However with youtube you can find demonstrations done in the best colleges to teach physics.  Of course live demonstrations are always the best, but it is not always possible to do that.  As a physics teacher I want to make sure to utilize youtube to help my students learn physics and make it a lot more fun and exciting.
This is a great advantage that teachers have with projectors and computers in every room.  Many times teachers do not use their computers to teach in the classroom, but youtube has so much potential to be a great tool for education.  More teachers should become familiar with youtube and use it more within the classroom.  Especially being a science major there are many things that can not be seen or shown within the boundaries of a classroom, but youtube really helps to get rid of this limitation.  I hope as teachers use youtube as a resource they can also be able to upload demonstrations and learning materials onto youtube for everyone else in the world to benefit.  Instead of constantly having to reinvent the wheel if teachers can share with each other their hard work we can all give the students the best education.

2 comments:

  1. I also posted about Youtube and how useful it is for the music world of education. I' not surprised that you would find it just as useful for teaching physics. I never thought about using video demonstrations as a substitute for lacking equipment. That could come in handy if our school didn't have a lot of a certain instrument, I could show a video of a professional and maybe recruit a couple of players to switch instruments.

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  2. With the shortages of school supplies in the classrooms I can imagine how difficult it might be for science teachers to demonstrate experiments if they do not have the necessary supplies. So I completely agree with you and your argument that YouTube should be incorporated in the classrooms. If used correctly and ethically, YouTube can only help!

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