On the road to mastering YouTube

            YouTube is one of my favorite websites. I could spend hours upon hours a day looking at videos. It is a great site to find popular music and songs. Every famous and up and coming singer posts their music onto YouTube. That’s because it’s a great platform for it to be heard. Recently YouTube has a music specific page to its website. It’s literally right on its homepage. Upon clicking it you come across a wide selection of music. YouTube actually becomes familiar over time with your listening patterns and it will work to find you similar songs.

            Although it may not seem like it YouTube is also a great educational tool. Many news stations have YouTube accounts and they post stories and alerts to their page. YouTube also has a What to Watch page and it will periodically give you updated videos according to what your subscriptions may be.

          

  Subscriptions is a big part of YouTube. Users can utilize this tool to pretty much become a member of a YouTube channel. I myself am subscribed to several YouTube pages. Subscriptions are so powerful because it lets you follow a certain person or topic. Say if I wanted to find videos of Chiropractic care. Then I would search for a chiropractic channel that might show several videos. After watching them I can then subscribe to the channel so I can receive updates when newer videos are poster.

            YouTube also gives users the chance to embed or share videos onto different websites. Multiple sites are supported to accommodate YouTube videos. The benefit of first uploading a video to YouTube is that you only have to upload it once. From there you can just take that YouTube video and share it to other sites. A user can also specify what time he wants his embedded or shared video to start at. A little box underneath the logos to which sites support YouTube lets you chose what time to start the video.

            YouTube is also one of the biggest platforms that the youth of today use to try and achieve fame. Many people do it and many people have done it successfully. Usually it starts out with a person making a relevant video. Then when their subscribers start to grow the YouTuber as they’ve become to be known start to make videos regularly. An example is Jimmy Tatro. He started making videos in High School as a hobby. Now he is a professional actor who had a prominent role in 22 Jump Street. He still makes YouTube videos. YouTube is a new and revolutionary way to achieve fame. 

This is an assignment from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College. The course is called Collaborative Computing. For details, visit the immersive BC portal at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc