YouTube rocks!!!

What an exciting and stimulating universe I’ve been losing for years “thanks to” my slow speed Internet connection! My friends often send me e-mails containing the url of a video from YouTube and they describe it as the funniest and oddest and craziest thing that they have ever seen in their whole life…and I’ve never been able to watch one of them!!! Poor me!!! It’s really frustrating not to have the proper tools to take advantage of all these new opportunities to learn English online. Unfortunately, changes seem to happen very slowly in my family: I’ve been begging for broadband for months, but there are still no traces of it in my house. By the way, I didn't give in: what we watched on Wednesday aroused my curiosity, so I managed to go to an Internet point to surf the Net a little bit. What did I find out? Well, if you thought that in YouTube you can only find freaky videos to impress your friends, you definitely need to broaden your horizons, otherwise you could miss the chance to exploit what this technology can really offer you. For example, in TeacherTube, you can find an unlimited collection of materials that people from all over the world uploaded with the most different aims: helping other people to overcome a problem in the learning process, bearing their witness about the usefulness of a teaching method, explaining the latest discovery they made in their works of research. You know, what impresses me the most each time I use the Internet is the unbelievable amount of people ready to spend some of their time simply to place something they consider somehow useful at others’ disposal: social bookmarking, Wikipedia, podcasts, the blogosphere and now YouTube are very striking examples of how people can benefit from communicating and sharing.
Yet, as we all should know by now, there is also the other side of the coin: since everybody can have access to these tools, they can easily become a means to spread something that is not worth watching at all. I’m clearly using a euphemism now: recently, the Internet has become sadly known as an example of how men can turn technologies into something we have to worry about (let’s think about the websites in which paedophiles entice children or the videos showing episodes of guys bullying at school). We cannot ignore what is going on: our criticism is fundamental to make wise use of the Web and its resources.

I decided to add a couple of videos to my blog.

Video from spastik0827
The first one is just to make you laugh and to let you know something more about me: it is a short extract from an episode of “Will and Grace” and it represents the kind of series I prefer. I can’t help splitting my sides with laughter when I listen to Jack’s quips and I believe it could be a relaxing and pleasant way to get in touch with contemporary English.

Video from MadridTeacher
The second one gave me the chance to put myself in a teacher’s shoes. The speaker, who has been teaching English for a long time both to children and to adults lists the main obstacles to EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learning: students don’t have time enough to seriously devote themselves to their homework; they can hardly accept difficulties; they soon get tired of the tasks they are asked to do; they don’t want to talk in class. Therefore, teachers always have to find new ways to incite them into taking part in the activities and have to take into consideration their personality not to hurt them…what an effort! It made me smile because I have to admit that Stephen says the naked truth: we students are sometimes a very demanding audience, but I think we can also reward a teacher’s devotion with our hard work. What’s your opinion?