You may be aware that I’ve been busily producing online videos showing how to draw things. Many teachers have said they’d like to show these to their children, but YouTube is blocked at their schools. There is not even access for teachers in charge of the mouse, who want their children to see something amazing that will unlock the the subject they are learning at the time.
The answer used to be to download the video at home and bring it in on a USB stick – an extra hassle and a brilliant way to infect the school system with viruses at the same time! But YouTube have now stopped the download facility – they are most likely preparing for a free to view, pay for download system – certainly a pay for HD quality download. That makes sense.
There are systems that will allow you to strip out YouTube video and download it, but that really is beyond the scope, time or interest of your average primary school teacher.
So I’m working on a new drawing school website, I’ve found a way to produce a YouTube like experience, serving video on demand, using an Open Source Content Management System, called Joomla, that delivers video as Flash so it is cross-platform and ready to play on most browsers.
On Monday I tried it on a school whiteboard and it worked – the video came through unfiltered by the the education network content filters – hooray!
I spent the week fiddling with the site and took away all the pages that come with a fresh install of Joomla. Yesterday I wanted to show a group of infants how to draw the cat I’d just been reading a story about. I typed in the address and it came back blocked as it had inapproriate or offensive language! This is all the language that was on the page – there was no video at all.
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Nothing wrong there! Then I remembered that I’d changed the site meta data, the hidden description of the site that Google uses for searching, to:
Official free video site of Children’s Author and Illustrator, Shoo Rayner. Watch videos and learn to draw like Shoo.
‘how to draw’, how to sketch’, ‘how to paint’ draw, paint, drawing, pen, pencil, paper, video, instruction, teach, learn, Animals, flowers, machines, ‘instruction video’, ‘Drawing School’, ‘learn to draw’, ‘learn to cartoon’, cartoon, anime, manga
I can’t see anything offensive there at all – maybe it’s just the word, Video? Or Manga, or Cartoon, or Anime? Are these words that bring down the level of education and so must be resisted, or are they the words that excite and involve children?
Something needs to be done about this. The greatest educational resources ever known in human history are being denied to our school children. No one is stopping them going home and watching sex and violence online at home – and they do – you should hear some of the things children tell me they’ve seen!
This is not nannying – this is education protecting itself from litigation and that’s crazy. We need a new contract between parents and schools – a grown-up contract, where parents accept that sometimes accidents happen at school as they do at home, and a dodgy link is pressed. This is not a cause for claiming compensation.
Sure, block the open computers that children use and abuse, but have teacher’s computers open but passworded, and one or two computers open but supervised computers available for real, serious online research by the children. How else are they going to learn that the internet is a force for good. All we teach them at the moment is that it is a dangerous place and hide the best bits from them least they should enjoy themselves or, heaven forbid, learn something!