Web 2.0: Adventures in Twitter, YouTube and "Go Live!"

By Their Powers Combined:

This week I made a concerted effort to maximize the combined powers of Twitter and YouTube. Coming from a place of near zero public presence on either, this was a tougher journey than I anticipated. Last week I tweeted for the first time since 2011. While I have created and shared more than 50 videos on YouTube, the majority are "Unlisted", meaning they won't show up in a search and can only be viewed by those with whom I share the direct link. My self-style adventure this week involved creating and posting new "Public" videos on YouTube, sharing those videos on Twitter, and attempting to host a "Go Live" streaming event on YouTube, which I promoted on Twitter.

Tweetstorming for Reinforcements:

Since I know my classmates are following the #etec527 hashtag, I attempted to enlist their help in making this adventure a success. Prior to the ice storm that wrought havoc on most of the schools in North Texas this week. I reached out to see if any classmates might be going to the DISD STEM Expo this weekend.

Tweeting my EdTech Explorations:

I also used Twitter to share my progress on my technology review this week, first sharing a short game I created on CoSpaces EDU for my classmates to try out, and later sharing the YouTube video I creating giving a quick demonstration and tour of the CoSpaces EDU software and its potential uses in education.

Adventures in Going Live:

I learned a lot this week about the controls YouTube places on its live streamers. For one: users cannot create a live stream until 24 hours after they request access to create a live stream. There's a whole countdown clock and everything! Why is this? My guess is to prevent the people who create throwaway accounts from immediately live streaming copyright-protected content (like live football games, etc.) Anyway, I requested access, waited for approval, and then announced my intention to live stream (both on Twitter and in our class's "Student Lounge" discussion board).

FOILED!

My plans were sadly thwarted! When I arrived at the event and clicked the "Go Live!" button on my phone, I found out that YouTube accounts require that your channel have at least 50 subscribers before you are permitted to do a mobile live stream. Plan B: I created a hot spot with my phone and pulled out my Surface Go laptop. Foiled again! While I had YouTube's permission to host a live stream with my computer's web cam, I needed to download an external streaming agent in order to use YouTube to stream. I found one, but it would have taken 2 hours to download using my hot spot internet... so I went with Plan C: I explored the event taking lots of small video clips and then compiled them into a YouTube video, which I then shared on Twitter that evening after the Expo.

Conclusion:

While sadly, my initial plans did not come to full fruition. I was excited to learn a lot about how Twitter and YouTube can be used and used in conjunction with each other. In hindsight, I feel like compiling and narrating clips after the event was in better taste than live streaming it. There were tons of kids at the STEM Expo playing with all the STEM toys. I would have felt very uncomfortable live streaming their faces onto YouTube, and taking clips allowed me better discretion in how I edited my content so that children were not identifiable in the videos. Additionally, I was able to narrate in a space that was much less loud that the giant convention hall, which I think provided an added benefit in clarity. Live streaming is still a skillset I would like to grow. However, I believe, in this instance, the short "walk-thru" clip that I ultimately compiled and posted was a more effective use of the technology. 
Video Walk-Thru of the 2023 DISD STEM Expo filmed, compiled and narrated by M. Miller

Note: 

If you'd like to contribute to my ability to host mobile livestreams, please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mackenziebmiller


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Web 2.0: Continuing the Journey

I've always considered learning to be a lifelong journey. If I'm not learning, exploring, expanding my skillset, pushing my boundaries and trying new things, I'm not living my best life. In this vein, I will certainly be continuing my exploration of Web 2.0 (and 3.0) technology and beyond well past the completion of this course.  Conferences and Conventions: I love the education and networking that happens when energetic, knowledgeable, motivated people get together and idea-swap! When choosing conferences and conventions to attend, I look for ones in areas of interest or potential future interests and prioritize ones with hands-on, workshop-style events -- I feel like a learn the most from these and I get to see the teaching methods modeled more realistically than in a lecture-style conference.  My Network: One of the great things about loving my job is that I talk about it a lot. Weddings, class reunions, kids birthday parties, random people I run into in line a the coffe...
Read more

Online Learning: Course Management Systems

Image
What is a Course Management System? According to the Vanderbilt Center for Teaching : A  course management system  (CMS) is a collection of software tools providing an online environment  for course interactions. A CMS typically includes a variety of online tools and environments, such as: An area for faculty posting of class materials such as course syllabus and handouts An area for student posting of papers and other assignments A gradebook where faculty can record grades and each student can view his or her grades An integrated email tool allowing participants to send announcement email messages to the entire class or to a subset of the entire class A chat tool allowing synchronous communication among class participants A threaded discussion board allowing asynchronous communication among participants So, how is this different from a Learning Management System? I'm still trying to figure that out, and there seems to be a lot of overlap in the definitions. Exploring CMS...
Read more

Online Learning: Wielding Wiki's

Image
My First Wiki While I've made use of massive online wiki sites (like Wikipedia) before, I have never created my own wiki. This week I used PB Works to create an educational wiki and begin to populate it. While some parts of creating my first wiki were pretty simple, I found some downsides to using this tool as a form of educational intercourse and distributed learning platform, which I will discuss in further detail below. Getting Started with PB Works To kick off my first personal wiki page, I created an account with PB Works. This alone took several hours as there appears to be some sort of glitch in the registration process where I had to work my way through several help channels before I could get my email address confirmed. Once my account was created, then I created my first workspace. Here's what a blank, default educational account workspace looks like when you generate it: As you can see, some fields are populated with a bit of information to get you started, but overa...
Read more