YouTube

Hi there!

How are you all? Today I am going to talk about a very famous tool we explored in the lab on Wednesday…It has been the last one we introduced this semester… Ladies and gentlemen, here comes YouTube!!!
Thank God this time I cannot say I had never heard about it before; I visit this website regularly and my mail box is often full with messages containing links to funny videos placed there. Anyway, I had never thought to register, probably because I was just interested in watching the videos rather than in posting them.
I am not going to spend many words on the videos Sarah put online for the “e-tivity 7” as I have already left my comments in the forum; I would just like to say we have a lot to learn from them, and of course I am not only talking about the language :-)

The impressions I had clicking around on YouTube are more or less the same as those I had when we explored the blogosphere, flickr and del.icio.us.: this website is a huge container filled with loads of material!! And unfortunately, good stuff is not always easy to spot.
Nevertheless, I am sure YouTube can be useful to improve my language skills since it can be a great chance to listen to some English. It can also help me learn how to do some things I am not familiar with…I am thinking for example about those videos Sarah put on our course blog to guide us through “Bloglines”: I could not go to the lesson in the lab that day, so those videos were simply vital to me ;-)
However, as is well known, on YouTube you also find pretty silly stuff, like those videos taken with mobiles by students (or should we say "baby-gangs"?) during the lessons. I think one of the negative sides of this website is that you can post almost everything you want there, which means also a lot of rubbish. So you'd better watch out and always be critical!

I was just wondering…Thanks to YouTube some weeks ago the German police managed to prevent a school-massacre; the two guys who had planned it had posted a video where they explained their intentions. If this website had not existed, maybe nobody would have found out what was about to happen.

I often ask myself why videos have become so fashionable lately…A couple of years ago nobody would have cared about them. And I also ask myself which role everyone’s right to privacy plays in websites like YouTube (IF it actually plays a role); I mean, if someone films me and then puts the video online without my permission, can they be prosecuted if I report them?

I was quite happy when Sarah introduced us this tool, though. So far I have been surfing through YouTube just for fun and I have never thought about it as an alternative way to improve my English. I guess I will keep an eye on it to see if I find something interesting and helpful (the I-Rack video was simply awesome!)

Ok, I hope it was not too long this time :-)

See you all in class!

Eleonora

Video-Bohemian Rhapsody-

Hello you guys!
Well, as you can see I decided to follow Sarah’s suggestion and I posted a video on my blog. At the beginning I could not do it as I had not understood how to do it…Sorry, it takes me a bit to get into these things :-) But at the end everything worked out!
Unfortunately, the video I chose has nothing to do with language learning…I hope it will be fine the same :-/ A friend of mine sent me this link some time ago…There you will see a man playing music with his hands. This song was written by Queen, it is pretty old but quite famous though, so probably it will not be the first time you hear this melody :-)

The guy is a phenomenon, on YouTube you can find many videos where he plays other songs…I am still wondering how on earth he can produce these sounds…And, most of all, can he really do that? On the Net you will never know if something is real or just a fake…;-)

Anyway, I hope you will enjoy it!

BYE!