Educational content creators, like John and Hank Green on “CrashCourse,” are revolutionizing the way that young people are learning. They create high quality videos that entertain as well as inform.
Did you know PSY has been a pop phenomenon in South Korea for about 10 years prior to “Gangnam Style”? How did he become so popular in Europe and America, though? Because people spent a ridiculous amount of time searching for his video on YouTube. With more than 5,073,314 likes, “Gangnam Style” has recently been inducted into the Guinness Book of World Records as the most liked video on YouTube. Ever.
YouTube is an amazing place to shut off your brain for a couple hours and watch videos of cats and song covers on the ukulele. YouTube is better than TV entertainment, but what if we stopped looking at YouTube just for the cats, and started to look at it as an educational tool?
No really. It’s actually kind of cool.
The first YouTube Educational summit was held Aug. 1. Content creators from all around the world came to the YouTube headquarters to discuss the ways that the video site could help education.
Many of these channels focus on math and science. Michael Stevens, the creator of VSauce, answers questions like, “What color is a mirror?” and “How much does the Internet weigh?” Henry Reich, the creator of MinutePhysics, takes topics like the Higgs Boson and the origins of quantum mechanics and explains these complicated topics through drawings.
Of course, Hank and John Green from the Vlogbrothers have also branched out into the educational side of YouTube in their channel, CrashCourse. John Green just finished his segment on World History and is now working on a mini-series about literature. Hank Green just finished his segment on Biology and is now teaching about “The Origins of the Universe.”
These people have figured out how to teach complicated topics while still keeping it interesting for the viewers. Their high quality videos are filled with different graphics and interesting tidbits of information sited from different professional sources.
Educational videos are becoming more popular as YouTube keeps on funding more channels. Many teachers are starting to use these channels as supplements in their classrooms. They’re great reinforcers and they hold students’ attentions better than a classic power point. There are so many content creators to choose from; they love what they’re doing and want to make educational videos that will be used in the classroom.
Pause your cat-falling-off-the-shelf video and take a second to search up ViHeart’s videos about math. Who knows, you could learn something.
You can watch the Green brothers here, MinutePhysics here and ViHeart here.
By: Ellie Papadakis
