Summary
YouTube recently developed YouTube for Schools which allows you to create your very own school account for access to YouTube EDU content (www.youtube.com/education), as well as a customizable playlist of videos that will be viewable only within your own school network. You can learn more about YouTube for Schools by going here: http://www.youtube.com/education_signup.
We previously added a YouTube filter that allows you to easily unblock a particular video in YouTube without unblocking the entire site, however, you can now turn on just one filter setting to give your users access to hundreds of thousands of educational videos instantly.
There are some limitations with the YouTube for Schools service:
- YouTube for Schools does not currently work with IOS devices. The YouTube player on Apple IOS devices directly accesses the videos and bypasses any filtering put in place by YouTube. YouTube is aware of this issue and
are working on a solution. - If a user goes to www.youtube.com they will not be automatically re-directed to www.youtube.com/education. This means that the user can get to YouTubeâs main page and can see the thumbnails of any videos posted. However, if they decide to click on a non-educational video, they will receive an error message from YouTube that states, “This video
is unavailable with the Education Filter enabled…”. - Users can still use the search tools available on YouTube to search
on ALL content. This will allow your users to view the thumbnail of the video, however, they will not be able to view a non-educational video (see error message above).
Please note that this is a new feature for YouTube. As such, it is constantly changing and does have some limitations. There is an FAQ located at http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2592715 . There’s also a Google Education forum where you can submit feedback at groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/forum/#!categories/google-education/youtube-for-schools. You can also email Google / YouTube via edu@support.youtube.com .
Applies To
SecureSchool
More Information
You can manage your YouTube Filtering settings in SecureSchool by going to “Website Filtering” -> “YouTube Filtering” -> “Select Method“. Under the Select Method tab, you now have the following options:
- Allow YouTube videos by unique ID using K12USA SecureSchool’s Filter Videos Interface
- Use YouTube’s
Edufilter feature with your own YouTube for Schools account - Use YouTube’s
Edufilter feature with K12USA SecureSchool’s YouTube for Schools account
References
- http://www.youtube.com/schools
- http://www.youtube.com/education_signup
- http://www.youtube.com/education
- http://www.youtube.com/account_school
- https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2695317?hl=en
- https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2592715?hl=en&ref_topic=2592688
