YouTube: A Language Teacher's Best Friend

I love teaching at an immersion school. Teaching a young child a second language is a very gratifying experience with quick and audible results. What I don't like about teaching at an immersion school is the lack of resources. French books are extremely expensive and hard to find. Same goes for French children's music, films, and other media. But fear not, future language teachers, for there is still hope: YouTube!

YouTube is an extremely helpful resource for language teachers and learners! On YouTube, I have found tons of resources to use in my classroom: French songs, French TV shows, French movies, French vocabulary practice videos, French book read-alongs... French everything! And all for free! Obviously, there are more educational YouTube videos out there in English, so you have to do a little digging to find the good French ones--but they are certainly out there if you go searching!

My Kindergarteners LOVE watching my collection of YouTube videos. I use them to provide movement in between lessons. I use them to enrich Literacy time with stories and poems that we would otherwise not hear. I use them to expose students to different Francophone cultures, vocabularies and accents. And of course, in true Kindergarten Teacher fashion, I use them to motivate students to behave. (For example, I tell the kids that if we clean up quickly and quietly, perhaps we will have enough time to watch a video at the end of the day!) Little do my students know that their "reward" videos are in fact teaching them something and exposing them to more French. I am a genius!

Now, for those of you who would like to start incorporating YouTube resources into your own elementary classrooms (foreign language learning or not), here are some tips and tricks that I have discovered that may be of use to you:

• Make yourself a teacher YouTube account. It's easy! All you have to do is go onto YouTube and sign in using a Google account. (It is a smart idea to use a teacher Google account rather than your personal Google account.) Once you are signed into YouTube, you will automatically have a YouTube Channel tied to your account. On your YouTube channel, you can create playlists to keep your collection of videos organized. You can create playlists for weekly themes, units of study, subject areas, learning targets, etc. Here is a glimpse of what my YouTube Channel looks like!

• Once you have created some playlists, make sure to update them periodically throughout the year. New and useful YouTube videos are being posted all the time! On the other hand, YouTube video are also being deleted all the time and you can lose some good content from your playlists without knowing/replacing it. Plus, I found that once one of my YouTube videos is deleted, then I get an ugly "Deleted Video" image in my playlist queue until I remove it. Yuck.

• You can even create and upload your own YouTube resource videos and put them onto your YouTube channel for easy student and parent access. For language teachers, personalized videos can be very useful to help students and parents with homework instructions, vocabulary pronunciation, etc. Here is a sight word video that I made for my students to help introduce the "word of the week" in school and to then reinforce it at home. (More on how to make videos like this in next week's blog post two weeks!)

• When logged onto your teacher YouTube account, make sure to avoid searching for personal videos that you may want to watch at home on your own. Your searches will affect what videos YouTube advertises to you on your homepage, sidebars, etc. After playing the alphabet song in class, you do not want a Jimmy Fallon video popping up in front of your students. Learn from my mistakes!

• YouTube will often play an un-skippable advertisement before allowing you to watch a selected video. This is very problematic in the classroom. It wastes instructional time, it excites and distracts students, and it can possibly expose students to inappropriate ads. To avoid this problem, use Google Chrome to watch YouTube and make sure to download the "Ad Blocker Plus" extension from the Chrome Web Store. This will block commercial ads from playing before you watch a YouTube video. It works like a charm!

• In my district, using YouTube while on the Wifi network is restricted (something to do with bandwidth issues). I have learned that if I plug my computer directly into the internet port in the wall using an ethernet cable, then YouTube is allowed. If you are having trouble displaying YouTube video at your school, perhaps this solution could work for you too.

For my fellow Frenchies out there, here are some great elementary-appropriate French YouTube channels that I have found over the past year. These resources are full of great videos that you can use with young French Immersion students:

1. Monde des petits.Fr : TONS of animated stories and songs in French. Unfortunately, the high-pitched singing voices can sometimes be annoying.
2. Les P'tits z'Amis : More animated videos and songs. A good resource for animated fairy tales and also some good songs about health and safety.
3. Mini ABC : Short interactive videos, lessons, and games about literacy, math, science, and more. Videos are from a Canadian children's TV show called Mini TFO.
4. Mini Doremi : Traditional and original songs and nursery rhymes aimed at the very young. Another Mini TFO resource.
5. Mini Mation : Animated TV shows such as Caillou and Barbapapa. Fun and educational because they are all in French! Youpi!
6. Monde Des Petits (a different one) : More animated TV shows in nice and simple French, including T'choupi, L'Ane Trotro, Petit Ours, and my personal favorite Peppa Pig.
7. French From Beginners to Advanced : Grammatical and vocabulary videos mostly for older students. Some of the phonetic videos could be useful for students learning to read and sound out syllables.
8. Mme Faltesek's YouTube Channel : Feel free to peek at my collection and see what I have came up with or copied from others!

I hope this blog post was useful to you! YouTube may not be the newest flashy app available, but it is a tried and true resource that is chock-full of information for the classroom. With a little effort, you can find tons of language learning videos that could benefit your students' learning. Give it a try and see what you find!