Nicole Madison is mom to three wonderful girls and one literally bouncing boy. She is a freelance writer and editor, which allows her to enjoy homeschooling her children while also earning an income. Nicole incorporates free resources into homeschooling as much as possible and has come a long way since spending hundreds of dollars at the beginning of every school year. She has a passion for reading, science, and math. Visit Nicole’s website at Madison Copywriting.

Link to Product/website: http://www.teachertube.com/

Description of Product: “Our goal is to provide an online community for sharing instructional videos. We seek to fill a need for a more educationally focused, safe venue for teachers, schools, and home learners. It is a site to provide anytime, anywhere professional development with teachers teaching teachers. As well, it is a site where teachers can post videos designed for students to view in order to learn a concept or skill.”

Nicole’s Description of Product: TeacherTube is a website that provides a FREE platform for viewing and sharing educational videos. They can be watched online, and there’s no need to save or download anything. Who provides the videos? Teachers and other educators, including homeschoolers, create their own videos and upload them to the site. They can then choose to make their videos public, which means allowing others to view them from around the world, or keep them private.

You don’t have to join to view the videos, but you’ll need to become a community member if you’d like to upload your own. Becoming a community member is completely FREE and just requires filling out a quick sign-up form that asks for your email address, country, gender, and age range–no sensitive information is required. By signing up, you’ll certify that you are at least 18 years old, an educator, and in agreement with the site’s terms of use and privacy policy. Once you’ve signed up, you don’t have to log on to search for videos or watch them. You’ll only need to log on if you want to upload a video, leave comments, or rate a video.

Homeschool Uses: I can’t say enough about how great TeacherTube is for finding topics for homeschooling. You can use the FREE educational videos to reinforce homeschooling topics and find more information about subjects that interest your child. Some of the videos are funny as well as educational, and some incorporate cartoons and music. There are videos for all ages and all types of learners, but they may be especially helpful for auditory and visual learners.

You can also use the site to make your own videos to use in homeschooling. Record yourself going over the steps of an experiment for your kids, use animation to tell a historical story, or sing a little ditty about fractions–the possibilities are endless. You can store these videos on the site for private use by your family or share them with other educators. You could even make and share videos with a homeschooling group or resource center.

Content and Safety: At any given time, this site may contain information on just about any topic of interest to educators and students. I noticed topics ranging from American history and calculating speed using a chocolate bar to “The Amazing Adventures of Tally Man” (math). There are even videos about martial arts. You can find videos by typing your subject in the search box at the top of the page or you can visit one of the channel links instead. The site has videos up to the college level and even includes some for professional development.

Though TeacherTube is intended for use by educators and students, it is possible for inappropriate content to slip through. Likewise, there may be videos on topics you don’t want your children to see or things you feel should wait until they are older. As such, it may be best to browse the site with your children or even hand pick videos for them to watch. That said, there is a rating system in place that allows community members to rate videos and flag those they deem inappropriate. TeacherTube staff members are then supposed to review videos that have been flagged and remove them if necessary.

Nicole’s Experience Using the Product: While my children can learn from reading about a subject or listening to me talk about it, I’ve found that they retain the information best when it is broached from more than one direction. For this reason, I often incorporate art with science and history or baking with fractions. When they can visualize a topic or use it in a hands-on project, they tend to remember it.

I was excited to learn about TeacherTube, which works much like the very popular YouTube, because it would provide a way for me to use free online videos to reinforce topics I’m currently teaching. For example, after doing a lesson on muscles, my children were able to watch a TeacherTube video with me to see muscles in action. The site is very easy to use, which makes it even more helpful for busy homeschoolers. I’ve tried it for science, math and history so far. I even found a video to use that covers sentence fragments.

Tutorial or Promotional Video of the Product:

Summary: I plan to continue using TeacherTube a few times a week to reinforce our lessons and add a little fun to each topic. My children enjoy watching the videos on this site and have actually begun to ask for them! I think TeacherTube can be beneficial for children of all ages. If you’d like to read more about TeacherTube, take a look at this article by Katherine Leal Unmuth of “The Dallas Morning News.”