Using TubeChop in the Classroom

For any teacher who struggles to find videos to meet the classroom time limitations, there is a solution! Recently, I explored the tool TubeChop which is an online tool that lets you single out important parts in a YouTube video that you might like to show in class, without having to show the whole video! What a miracle! You can shorten hour long videos and make them thirty seconds if you want to! This is an important tool for teachers because as we all know the one thing we're missing in the day is time. So yes, now you can show as many videos as you want to without having to worry about wasting too much class time. In my classroom activity, I didn't utilize TubeChop to the max as my video correlates to a complete story but TubeChop cut out almost 10% of the video that was unnecessary to listen to before and after the material that I wanted to focus on. Now, with a three minute video, this doesn't sound like much, but with an hour long video, it saves a huge amount of time, time that we as teachers don't have. So for this assignment, I didn't cut a huge amount of time off of my video but I practiced using TubeChop successfully and found it to be an extremely useful tool for the future. For an activity in class for my ESOL students I chose to focus on a cultural topic as it is the holiday season and well as follow up with this cultural lesson with some oral feedback as well as writing reflections. Showing this video as an activity would hit a total of three standards: Standard 5 Language for Cross-Cultural Knowledge and Understanding, Standard 4 Language for Social Interaction, and Standard 2 Language for Literary Response and Enjoyment. My TubeChop Video is the Story of Thanksgiving. I would show this video in class to my ESOL students to demonstrate a holiday that we celebrate here in the United States. I think the language in the video is language appropriate as well as culturally appropriate for my learners. I would show the video in class and have my students then orally discuss what they had seen in the video, checking for comprehension as well as looking for reflection of this holiday and how they perceive it. I would also have the students for homework write a paragraph discussing the video that we watched and have them reflect on this U.S. holiday and then discuss a holiday that they celebrate in their home country. I would check their homework the next day and allow students to share their feelings and paragraphs. This would not only be a fun activity to display to students, but it would also hit almost all, but specifically 3, of the standards. Thanks for taking the time to read!