Key factors to implement a multilingual and cross-curricular YouTube - Based Portal as an online Teacher Training resource

Abstract

Nowadays, social media, especially video, represent an important source of information, being relevant both in formal and in non-formal education. Training preservice teachers to use and generate online audiovisuals as teaching resources could improve their teaching and professional skills. This study presents an innovative experience developed at a Teacher Training faculty with the aim of fostering preservice teachers´ generation and use of online videos as teaching resources. Student-generated videos have been located and disseminated through an online TV portal, YouTube-based, implemented for this purpose. The preservice teachers involved in the experience generated more than 300 didactic videos. The online tv portal was designed to link and connect the Teacher Training faculty teachers and students with other education faculties, and with some elementary and secondary schools. Additionally, this channel place value on student-generated videos and facilitate their projects dissemination. Results show a beneficial interaction for all of them, including a wide variety of video formats production. The contents released through these videos reveal a multicultural and multilingual richness, and a desirable and necessary interaction with schools. Flexibility in video and channel requirements became one of the most important key factors of the experience, which was able to accommodate the high heterogeneity among educative stages and institutions.