Published by michael on 09 Apr 2009
YouTube’s Quick Capture for Education?
There are many possible uses for audio and video in Web-based education. As an educator, you could record greetings, provide foreign language instruction, present lectures, explain assignments, interview subject matter experts, or critique student projects. Students could capture case studies, practice language pronunciation, perform skits, or demonstrate mastery of a process. The possibilities are near endless.
Unfortunately, there are also many obstacles to using multimedia in Web-based education. Editing software may be difficult to use, hardware may be expensive, various settings (such as bit rate, frames per second, codecs, etc.) may be confusing, and faculty and/or students may not have server space.
Fortunately, YouTube’s Quick Capture may provide a simple solution. With nothing more than an inexpensive webcam and computer microphone, you can quickly record video presentations that are easily embedded in your blog, wiki, learning management system (such as Moodle or Blackboard) or your educational Web site. Students can create video presentations just as easily and post their creations to your site’s comment system or discussion forum.
No special software needed! Quick Capture leverages Adobe Flash Media Server technology to connect to your Webcam and microphone to YouTube using nothing more than a Web browser! All you have to do is create a free account at YouTube, click the”Upload–>Quick Capture” drop-down menu on the top right, and press record! Since Google now owns YouTube, if you have a Gmail account, you already have a YouTube account!
Video and audio quality are adequate (although both depend on your equipment), and most of all, it’s free! Of course, there are no post-production editing tools, but you can always re-record.
Naturally, you probably don’t want to use Youtube for critical educational materials (as Paul Left suggests in the comments for this blog post). YouTube’s Quick Capture doesn’t give you with an easy way to copy your videos back to your local computer. “Not only can you not re-edit them.” suggests Paul, “but imagine what would happen if Google shut down YouTube - all your video materials would disappear overnight.” Good point.
For quick-and-easy video assignments from students, however, this technology might be appropriate. With just a microphone and an inexpensive webcam, for example, foreign language students could prepare short videos that demonstrates their mastery of pronunciation.
If you have any ideas about creative ways to use YouTube’s “Quick Capture” for educational purposes, please feel free to comment!
