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Do you YouTube?

30.Jan.08

Eric looks at four video sharing sites and how they can be used in teaching business English.

In this week's blog, I thought I'd look at four different video sharing sites and make some suggestions on how to use them.

www.youtube.com. This is probably the best established and richest source of online videos; you can find pretty much anything you might be looking for here. These content-based videos are good to use with language learners in specific lines of business since they help you focus on industry-specific vocabulary as well as helping students practice their listening skills.

The good thing about YouTube is the sheer scale of the site as you're likely to find anything you might be looking for here. A drawback is that you may need to be online in the classroom to watch the videos. It is possible to download and save them for off-line viewing or presentation but it's tricky to do. The quality of the videos are also mixed – some are professionally produced, while others have clearly been made at home and are therefore of less high quality.

www.ted.com. This website contains excellent, high-quality videos of professional speakers talking about their particular field. What is really good about these videos is that the speakers are recognisable people in their fields such as Richard Branson, Al Gore, Steve Pinker, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page (founders of Google).

Although the videos can be long (up to an hour, or more), they are good for extended listening activities, or to recommend to students as follow-up for a classroom activity. In a way this isn't a true video sharing site since users can only download, and not upload, videos, but perhaps as a result the quality is consistently high.

www.stage6.com. This is a true video sharing site like YouTube, but with significantly better video quality due to the technology used (DivX, in case you're interested). In addition to the picture quality being better, it also means that these videos will play on many modern DVD players. So if you don't have a computer in the classroom but you do have a TV and DVD player, you can download the videos on your home computer, burn them onto a DVD and take them into the classroom.

This site is still relatively new so it doesn't yet have nearly as many videos as YouTube, but is definitely one to watch – the fact that it makes downloading videos so easy and that the picture quality is so good makes it very attractive to people wanting to share their videos.

www.adsoftheworld.com (Thanks to Elke Beder for this tip at the last BESIG conference). This is a great site which allows advertisers to upload their radio, TV and print adverts. The site therefore features adverts for all kinds of products and services from different countries. The production quality of the videos is high, and one great way of using this site is by showing your students adverts for the same or similar products but aimed at different markets – the UK, Australia and the USA for example. This can help focus on issues such as differences in language usage, humour as it is used in different cultural contexts, selling techniques and more. The site also makes it easy to download the videos for offline usage – crucial if you don't have Internet access in your classroom, or if it's unreliable.

As I say, that's a selection of the four sites I've found to be the best ones out there at the moment – or do you disagree? Is there a different site you prefer?

All the best for now,

Eric