The history of YouTube is simple: It was set up in 2005 by three men (Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim), it was bought by Google in November 2006 for $1.65 billion, and it hasn’t been out of the news since.
In 2007, YouTube as a word failed to make an appearance in only 11 issues of The Guardian. In some cases, journalists will have been writing about specific content - sports clips or news footage, for example. In other cases it was the website itself that was making the news.
In this activity, learners are given the chance to explore how the most popular video-sharing site has been asserting its influence on many corners of society including news, the media, politics, advertising, music, entertainment, art and law.
The activity makes use of a ‘Hyperlinked Headlines’ document. This is a word file containing 30 newspaper headlines that are linked to the Guardian website from which they were obtained. Here is the plan:
Preparation
- Download the file:
hyperlinked-headlines.doc - Look at the 30 headlines and follow the links using CTRL + click. Afer browsing the newspaper articles, choose between 10 and 15 that you think your learners will engage with the most. Delete the rest.
- If you have a projector in your classroom, display the reduced ‘Hyperlinked headlines’ document on a screen. If you don’t have access to such technology, print off copies for your students.
Procedure (day 1)
- Get your students to look at the headlines and decide what the missing word is (in each case, the missing word is YouTube).
- Put your students into pairs or small group and get them to look at the headlines and guess a) Roughly what each news story is about and b) What each news story has to do YouTube.
- Let students share and compare their ideas.
- For homework, get each student to choose one of the headlines and write a summary the story it referes to. Make sure that each learner chooses a different headline if possible.
- Email a copy of the reduced ‘Hyperlinked headlines’ document to each learner so that they can follow their links.
Procedure (day 2)
Get each student to present his or her summary to the rest of the class. Alternatively, let students read each others’ written work by putting it all up on the classroom walls.