On Demand Video

I love the availability of online video today. I was reading a book to my daughters about our great nation's history and came to a page about landing on the moon. I asked them if they wanted to look for videos about that. We googled it and came up with a bunch of hits.

Lunar Landing Google Search

For some reason, my two daughters, 6 and under, were not very excited by the raw, unedited views. Not surprising. Then I found an edited version at HowStuffWorks. Of course, this is much more interesting. They (and I) wanted more. This reminds me of the 2008 Horizon Report about grassroots video and the easy availability of on-demand video. They predicted a one year or less timeline for grassroots video and I can see it in my work as an educator and our home life.

Recently we were researching tarantulas on the Web as well (our new pet). We found videos and articles galore--over 4.5 million hits! Going through this info was exciting for me as a father as I heard my 6 year old actually reading from the Wikipedia article (Go, Wikipedia!).

Interesting that though I'm an elementary school technology teacher, I would find the most convincing evidence of 21st century learning at my own home.