From basic concepts to complex experiments, YouTube enables Students and Educators to discover anything they want to learn as a part of their academic, curricular and extracurricular activities.
Through YouTube videos, educators can bring scientists, professors and experts into our classroom to help students learn from great illustrations and tutorials.
YouTube videos include visuals, music, voice-over and sound effects along with information., which keep students much more engaged with the videos. Moreover, students spend hours at home watching television, so, educators can take advantage of exposing them to educational videos on YouTube.
On the other hand, YouTube is also a great platform for many fields other than education. It enables many advertising and business companies to promote products and services, create awareness on them and get feedback from users. But, sometimes it’s difficult for educators to filter educational content and YouTube allows anyone to visit your videos, so, there can be privacy problems as well. There are also some explicit, violence, animal abuse and many videos which students should not be exposed to. So, as a coin has two opposite sides, everything is a combination of pros and cons, but when used in a proper way, YouTube can be a great educational video resource. The following are a few tips to use YouTube in education.
Never Set Students Free to Access it without Proper Guidance:
On the home page, It displays featured videos, recommendations, the most popular clips of the day and most talked about videos of the week, etc. As mentioned above, it contains videos other than educational videos, so, better not allow your students free access to it, without proper guidance.
Have a Look at Video’s Description before Playing It:
Enter your inquiry in the search bar; it will immediately display thousands of search results which contain the keywords you’ve entered. Instead of playing the video directly, read the description of it because the person who uploads the video will surely give a brief description of what the video is actually about. Find the most relevant video and help students learn about any concept.
Sharing a Video:
Educators can share a YouTube video in many ways. Mailing the video URL, sharing it on social networking platforms and embedding it in your blog, website, Wiki, etc., are the numerous ways of sharing a YouTube video. If you use a classroom blog or an official website of your institution, I recommend you the embedding procedure. There is an embed code available for every video which you can copy and paste on your blog or site to display the video on them. While copying the embed code, make sure you’ve unmarked “Show suggested videos when the video finishes”. This helps you expose your students to YouTube videos in a safe and secured manner.
Use Privacy Settings While uploading your Tutorial:
When you want only your students to watch your tutorial while flipping a classroom or providing them with a video resource, use privacy settings and set its privacy to private or unlisted. A private video can only be seen by you and the users you select. The video won’t appear on your channel or search results and will be invisible to other users. Making a video unlisted means that only people who have the link to the video can view it. To share an unlisted video, just share the link with the people who you’d like to have access to it, and they’ll then be able to see it. Unlike private videos, the people you share the video with do not need to have a Google account to see the video, and they can share it with more people simply by forwarding the link to them.
Use YouTube’s Educational Sections:
YouTube has recognized the problems educators are facing and has also come up with a solution. YouTube has recently launched education related sectionsin which only educational content is permitted. Let’s learn about a few channels.
YouTube Edu:
YouTube Edu is a great section that enables teachers to use YouTube freely in their classroom. It’s an educational section of YouTube, created specifically for education. Many professors, universities and educational institutions upload educational videos in this section. These videos help educators engage students with great tutorials, illustrations and experiments. It also enables them to develop professionally.
YouTube for Schools:
YouTube for Schools section is comprehensive, school appropriate, customizable and teacher friendly. Access thousands of free high quality educational videos on YouTube in a controlled environment.
I hope this information is useful for you to know about how we can use YouTube in a secured manner. We’d like to hear from you the ways in which you use YouTube in your classroom, also share with us few more educational channels or sections you find useful on YouTube. The comment box awaits you.
