Instructify

BY REBECCAH HAINES

Let’s say you’ve just begun a multimedia project in your techno-savvy classroom. You want your kids to use the latest tech tools to create a wonderfully creative product. Inevitably, this involves adding video clips to whatever they’re creating – blogs, wikis, what-have-you. As great as YouTube is, it really isn’t something you can just let kids go and run searches on at school (that is, of course, if you can get it at your school). So what’s an awesome, “technorate” teacher like yourself to do? Well, next time, try ZuiTube.

ZuiTube bills itself as “the largest collection of online videos for kids.” Just like on YouTube, you can search specific topics, or browse categories. Unlike YouTube, when you search for Uranus, you only come up with legitimate, kid-appropriate videos. ZuiTube is part of KidZui, an web browser for kids that filters internet content (Instructify reviewed KidZui in December of last year, if you’re interested in reading more on that).

Now, most of the videos you get back in your search actually do come from YouTube. And if you want your students to embed the video into their projects, you actually have to go to YouTube to get the embed code or URL. This is easy to do by just clicking on the YouTube icon on the video you’ve found using ZuiTube. Even though the students are going to YouTube, this method of getting a video is much less scary because you know what they’ve found is kid-appropriate thanks to ZuiTube.

As a teacher who just attempted a multimedia project with 6th graders BEFORE learning about ZuiTube, I can wholeheartedly say that ZuiTube will make my next project go much more smoothly. I am sure that you will find the same!

ZuiTube

KidZui

Related Stuff:

All Educational, All the Time–TeacherTube

Get Library of Congress videos on iTunesU

60 Second Recap summarizes classic literature