YouTube for schools

Videos or movies have always had the power to engage the learners by bringing the topic to life.

YouTube, although it has many relevant videos for the classroom, is blocked by many schools as there are also many inappropriate videos to be found there.

Fantastic! Now YouTube have released YouTube for schools. This provides a secure, safe environment where students have access to hundreds of thousands of appropriate videos.

School admins and teachers can log in and watch any video, but students cannot
log in and can only watch YouTube EDU videos plus videos their school has added.
All comments and related videos are disabled and search is limited to YouTube
EDU videos.

Teachers can customize the content available in their school. All schools get access to all of the YouTube EDU content, but teachers and administrators can also create playlists of videos that are viewable only within their school's network.

YouTube.com/Teachers has hundreds of playlists of videos that align with common educational standards, organized by subject and grade. These playlists were created by teachers for teachers so you can spend more time teaching and less time searching.

YouTube for schools web site

There is an area which details 10 ways to use YouTube in your classroom.

These include:

1. To spark lively discussion by engaging students through showing videos relevant to their lives. This can then lead to students considering different perspectives or another point of view.
2. Organise the video content you find into a playlist for you and your students
3. Archive your work so you can refer back at a later stage saving you time and effort.
4. Allow students to dig deeper into a subject by creating an appropriate playlist
5. Get struggling students up to speed and push strong students ahead by giving students the opportunity to review the videos at a later time i.e. at home. Videos can be used to address misunderstandings or difficult concepts
6. Review for upcoming exams
7. Create a YouTube centre for your classroom
8. Create quizzes, using a Google Form, to accompany videos to give instant feedback
9. Create interactive video quests by using annotations
10. Flip your classroom where students watch the video at home so you can focus on applying the concepts

TubeChop

Many schools block YouTube but as a classroom teacher there are times when you want to use a video from YouTube. I have previously written about EmbedPlus for editing YouTube videos. Often you only want to use part of the video. TubeChop is a great tool for the classroom teacher to do this. It is a simple and quick tool to use.

You type in the YouTube url. The video is then loaded into TubeChop. You can then cut out parts of the video so that you are left with the relevant parts you want to use. You then have the embedding code which you can use or you also have a new url that you can use (the url is no longer a YouTube link but now is a TubeChop link).

Here is an example of one I have chopped some off.

The new url is: http://www.tubechop.com/watch/182695

Embed Plus

A great web site for everyone (but especially for teachers) is Embed Plus.

Teachers often use videos from YouTube in their classrooms to enhance the thinking and learning. These videos can stimulate interest or illustrate a point. With Embed Plus you can edit the movie from YouTube to customise it for the needs of your class.

The slow motion is great for action videos or if you are teaching how to do something like a long jump in PE. The Previous and Next buttons let viewers skip forward and back within scenes that you’ve marked. The zoom will give viewers a closer look at wherever they move their cursor. You can also add your own annotations to the movies - something teachers will love where they can point out things that they want the students to take particular notice of.

A beauty of this web site is that it is all free! All you have to do is click the Get Started button and away you go.

I would love to hear how anyone is using this site for their classrooms.