Dec 20 2008
The Best Ways To Access Educational YouTube Videos At School
YouTube is blocked (appropriately so, in my opinion) by most school content filters. However, there are vast quantities of extraordinarily useful material on the site that would make for appropriate and enriching classroom content.
What’s a teacher to do?
Joyce Valenza just wrote When YouTube is blocked (seven ways around) which, as far as I can tell, is the definitive description out there about how to access appropriate YouTube content at school. I strongly encourage readers to go to her post and bookmark it.
For this “The Best…” list, though, I thought I’d highlight two tools (one that’s on her list and one that is not) that I’ve found to be the easiest for a non-tech-savvy person like me to use.
Joyce’s first suggestion is to explore alternative sites like TeacherTube or SchoolTube where you can find YouTube videos that might have already been uploaded by teachers (or upload one yourself), and whose url addresses might not be blocked by School District filters.
I think that’s a great idea. I use that option frequently. However, my preference is Edublogs TV, a sister organization to Edublogs. I use it a lot for one of my United States History classes, and have found it to be super-easy to upload YouTube videos and then have students view it from there. Edublogs isn’t really publicizing it yet while it’s in “beta,” but will start doing so in 2009. A site called Watch Know is another alternative. (Update: Edublogs TV has been having problems directly uploading YouTube videos. So, my new favorite way of accessing YouTube videos at school is to use YouTube Catcher to quickly download a video into an “flv” format, and then upload it into Edublogs TV).
Another recommendation that Joyce makes that I’ve used is the web tool Zamzar. YouTube doesn’t offer a way to download and save their videos, so you have to use a site like Zamzar to do so and save it on a Flash Drive (or your laptop) or make it accessible via an email link. Tony Vincent doesn’t appear to have updated his blog in a year, but his post on Download YouTube Videos And Use Them at School still provides the best step-by-step description on how to use Zamzar that I’ve seen.
Again, I encourage you to visit Joyce’s post. You might prefer some of her other ideas.
As always, feedback is welcome.
If you found this post useful, you might want to look at previous “The Best…” lists and also consider subscribing to this blog for free.(
5 responses so far
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I have another method I shared on my site in a post entitled How to Show YouTube and Other Internet Video at School Easily. Using the DownloadHelper extension for Firefox, almost any video is downloadable and can be converted to whatever type you can play. All of the software is free.
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There’s also a website called KickYouTube which does basically the same thing without additional software to download. Read more about it at Lifehacker.
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I use http://www.keepvid.com It works and has the higher quality mp4 for download.
That said, I’m weaning myself off of youtube.
1) There is a great consolidation (aka – the great web AD grab) going on and lots of educational material is being taken down. I for one got thrown off, no dialogue, just account cancelled.
2) the quality sucks! I blow up the videos but many are just horribly distorted.
3) they keep changing their API and ruining everyone who tries to build anything to create some kind of aggregation from their catalogue. Every unfriendly for those who want to promote educational materials. They do this for a reason…. ($$$ Ads).
I just recently put up an amazing page of NFB films on EFL Classroom 2.0 . Free, stream high quality, one click. VERY educational and not at all full of the “for the most part” tittilation that youtube offers now. There is a lot on youtube for us — the problem, they offer poor ways to share. I give that the thumbs down in this day and age. Use NFB and many other sites which are educator friendly…. Next, will come the PBS video page!
Happy holidays,
David
http://eflclassroom.ning.com
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I hope you all will keep WatchKnow (http://www.watchknow.org/) in mind as well, as we ramp up toward a loud public launch in 2009.
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Hi Larry, great post.
I use aTube Catcher. It’s free, very easy to use and you can download the videos in different formats. I prefer .avi, that way we can watch them in the computer or in a DVD player that reads avi files.
Also, I like to download the videos I’m going to use in my lessons. You never know when you are going to have problems with the internet connection.
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