EdTechTrek

The recent media frenzy (see eschoolnews article here) over the 16 year old Florida girl who was savagely beaten by eight other teens for the expressed purpose of posting their conquest on YouTube and MySpace brings up so many issues to think about. We have Internet safety, bullying, violence, media influence, morality,… But the question that keeps coming to mind for me is that of parenting and family. Parents have about 12 or so years to really influence their children before peer pressure begins to complicate things. Here we have teen children premeditating a terrible assault to be captured on video to share with the word. This is not typical teen deviation. Where are the parents? What have they been doing for the past 16 years? It is increasingly obvious that parents today need a new level of awareness and involvement in the lives of their kids - their digital lives. But putting all that aside for a moment, this behavior is foundationally about parenting. I must confess, I know nothing about the parents of the eight accused. However, their actions lead me to believe that something is severely lacking there.

It is so easy to blame the YouTube generation and YouTube itself. Blame the Internet. Blame pack mentality. Or, blame the school for not being aware of the underlying tensions that may have precipitated this attack. Even the victim’s mother is allocating some blame to the YouTube generation for being desensitized and warped by the media culture it has helped shape. However, true that this may be, kind, caring, service- and social justice-oriented, compassionate, responsible, intelligent, proactive, ethical, productively engaged people do not do this sort of thing. These are the attributes that any good parent would seek to cultivate in their child. Parents need to wake up. Parenting 2.0 is still a great deal about parenting 1.0. Kids do not teach themselves these positive behaviors. The “Golden Rule” is still something to be highly valued, taught, and modeled, no?

I recently learned of a new tool called Tooble that was introduced at Macworld Expo 2008. What is amazing is that this tool has been created by 2 high school teenagers! It is a free download and once it is installed, it works with YouTube and first downloads then converts your selected videos to .MP4 format. It will even automatically add them to your iTunes library if you wish and compatible for your iPod. For me, this is great because I never like to rely solely on a network connection when I want to show videos to my students in class or in a presentation elsewhere. I have been using Zamzar to convert such flash videos, but this tool makes it even easier. Here’s how it works (the functions correspond to the image below).

1. You can enter a URL of a specific video

2. You can search for a video at YouTube

3. You can search by YouTube’s common filters as well as your own favorites

4. Select the video(s) you want converted and saved locally as .mp4 files

5. Click “Download” and the magic begins.

It could not have been easier! For now it is only Mac compatible, but one of the high school students, Alex Catullo, is working on the Windows version. Thanks to their computer science teacher for encouraging powerful uses of technology beyond shallow mind maps, dull PowerPoints, and pretty page layouts.