Grandma's Secret Recipe for Cooking up PD from YouTube
How many times have you gotten stuck on something and just couldn’t figure out how to do it? Or … you need to put together something for your classroom, but you don’t want to pay a boatload of money to buy it?
When I was coaching volleyball in Texas I wanted my players to increase their vertical jump, so we built jump boxes for about 1/10th of the cost of buying them.
If you don’t already know YouTube Has hundreds of thousands … even millions of tutorials on everything from tying shoes to changing out a car engine to building jump boxes 🙂 It’s totally amazing. It’s also one of the best places for free professional development.
Well, let’s get you comfortable with finding the right tutorials on YouTube so you can learn the skills you need to be a better educator … whether you’re in the classroom, home, or business.
- Click on this link:Â youtube.com. Or you can type youtube into your browser URL bar and hit return.
- Now type what you want to learn in the Search box next to the YouTube icon.Â
Make a note of the number of results you got.
Here's the RECIPE for the best search results:
- Secret Sauce Ingredient #1: Use quotations around the topic you type into the Search bar
For example, type in “tie shoes tutorial” rather than tie shoes tutorial. Do this to reduce the number of results. By the way, you can use this method in any Google search and it will do the same thing.
- Secret Sauce Ingredient #2: Look for the video publication date.Â
Sometimes this will be in the title, but most of the time you’ll have to look at under the title and you’ll see when it was posted.Â
For instance, let’s look for a Canva tutorial. Go to YouTube and type in “Canva tutorial” and see what comes up.Â
Look at these examples … which one would you choose in order to learn Canva Basics?
If you said the top one, you’re right! Let’s call the top one #1 and the bottom one #2.
What’s the date on #1? How about #2? #1 is about 2-1/2 years newer so it will reflect any changes that Canva has made during that time.
- Secret Sauce Ingredient #3: Check out the video length
Since #2 is only 9 minutes long … you can determine the video length by time in the lower right hand corner of the image … it might be worth scrolling through to see if you can pick up any principles that still apply.
- Secret Sauce Ingredient #4: Evaluate the video information
Notice that the info below the titles lets you know who the authors are and how many views they’ve gotten. This is helpful if you find someone you really like following, you can search for their videos and once you sign into Google, you can subscribe and have access anytime. Check out this how-to for creating a Google/YouTube account.
- Secret Sauce Ingredient #5: Read the video description
Check it out to make sure the video is teaching what you want to learn.
- Secret Sauce Ingredient #6:Â Make sure you can understand and follow.Â
You will find a wide variety of languages, video quality, and sound quality – sometimes there won’t be any sound. The nice thing about these videos is that you can stop them, rewind, and even fast forward.
Developing these Secret Sauce skills will help you reduce the time you need to determine how any video will give you what you need … teach a new skill … use a new technology … help you determine your next travel destination. 🙂 The choices are limitless.
Enjoy! Happy Saucing!
So what do you think? Are you ready to jump into the billions of videos to find what you need?
You can’t make a mistake or break anything. Let me know what you searched for using the Secret Sauce. I’d love to hear how it went, so leave me a comment.
