The number of sites that offer online instructional videos has increased by a huge amount over the past year. Most of them have quite a large selection of excellent videos. However, almost all of them also include a few or more than a few (primarily related to sexual content) that make their sites not suitable for classroom use.

I thought readers might find it useful to see a “The Best…” list which highlight the ones out there that seem to have very good content and appear to have adequate screening in place (at least for now) that would allow their sites to be used in schools.

I’ve posted about several of these “how-to” sites in the past, but either I didn’t do very good screening then or they’ve added some inappropriate (for the classroom, at least) videos since that time.

That narrows things down quite a bit.

These kinds of videos provide great listening practice for English Language Learners. It’s high-interest content that they can choose. Plus, students could then write a summary about what they’ve learned, talk about it to a peer, demonstrate their new knowledge in front of a class, or use these videos as a model for developing their own video or written instructional piece on something they are an expert at doing.

Given my relatively strict criteria, here are my picks for The Best Online Instructional Video Sites:

How Stuff Works is great. It has a huge collection of online videos and other materials that includes a lot of “how-to’s” as well as telling…how stuff works.

How Cast

Instructables is another options.

The main reason I’m interested in this site, though, is that it provides get models for similar instructional tutorials students could either draw with pen on paper or online with one of the many drawing applications I’ve posted about in these “The Best…” lists:

The Best Art Websites For Learning English
The Best Ways For Students To Create Online Animations
The Best Ways To Make Comic Strips Online
The Best New Sites Students Should Use With Supervision

14 Tools and Resources to Get Students to Create Instructional Videos is from Shelly Terrell.

Let me know if you think if I didn’t adequately screen these three that made my list, and if you have recommendations for others that should be added.

If you found this list helpful, you might want to see the other over-ninety ones, too.