Being a teacher, have you ever been able to teach your students using YouTube. Not really, unless you download YouTube videos and play them using a video player locally. The reason is pretty obvious, you might not want to distract your students who see thumbnails of other videos like a new music or movie release or perhaps rumors about a hot actor (which also get more number of Youtube views). And how about the comments under the videos? I guess those are more than enough to distract a student and isn’t suitable for a classroom environment. Read on to know more about YouTube for Schools or check out the promo video at the end of this post to know more.
YouTube has a lot of informative videos other than a lot of nonsense or 18+ videos. Hence, to make it suitable for a classroom environment, YouTube has launched an education-only setting where you would not have any related videos or comments along with the video. This is a major initiative from YouTube after their recent redesign. You can set up a channel for your school and upload videos. This ensures that students watch education-only content and not anything else which might be distracting them.
YouTube project manager Brian Truong says on official YouTube blog:
“teachers that they want to use the vast array of educational videos on YouTube in their classrooms, but are concerned that students will be distracted by the latest music video or a video of a cute cat, or a video that might not be appropriate for students.”
Thus, YouTube had launched YouTube for Schools, a network setting that school administrators can turn on to grant access only to the educational content from YouTube EDU.
YouTube has already put some effort into it by thousands of educational videos from more than 600 partners, including the Smithsonian and TED.
Teachers can also choose to play videos from a playlist which consists over 300 videos classified according to subjects like Math, Science, Social Studies, and English Language Arts — and by grade level. You can also suggest some useful videos to YouTube in the playlist.
To Sign up for YouTube for Schools, you can check this.