Video Sharing and YouTube For Schools

Since my first post about video sharing I have learned a few more things about YouTube. It has a school component. This is a bit different than YouTube EDU. You can learn more about YouTube school by going to this link or for a just a snapshop view the video below.

As you can see from the clip above the comments feature and the links to related videos have been disabled in YouTube school. Your school can have an account that can restrict and tailor the kinds of YouTube clips that are available from this version of YouTube. If my understanding is correct you are dealing with a preselected subsection of YouTube. If you see something on regular YouTube does not mean that you will be able to make it available to students through YouTube School. I have no idea if you can load your own custom material to YouTube school or how content is vetted.  Sometimes what you don't see is just as important as what you can see. Having YouTube School decide what is educational content has the same ramifications as using Google exclusively as your own search engine. It controls and directs you to content. Some of that control is convenient and some of that control is a business model for linking you with advertisers.

YouTube School is a safer way to have at least some YouTube content available in schools that have been blocking YouTube altogether.  Your school can have an administrator account that sets up YouTube School and then allows for the approval and creation of teacher accounts. You are going to need some help from your school network administrator or more likely district level technology staff to get this all this working properly in your school.

Since I have not set up a YouTube School account myself I am not sure what the status of advertising is. As you can see from the sample clip below, YouTube Education still has all the advertisements that regular YouTube has.  You never know what the ad is going to be and even though you can skip it after a few seconds the beginning of the ad can be distracting enough to the class. If anyone knows about advertising and YouTube School I would love to hear about it.




While creating this blog post I also noticed a few features that YouTube has for embedding videos. You have a lot of control over the size the video will take. I had not noticed this option from the other video sharing sites I looked at. I find it particularly useful for my blog since the text column is fairly narrow and it is easy to have your video extend past the text margins which your blog look unprofessional. I did a partial screen capture with Jing so you can see the embedding options I had for the video clip above.