YouTube Filters Their Way Into Classrooms

YouTube have unveiled a new branch of their popular online video service tailor-made for classrooms, teachers, and students. The service, known simply as ‘YouTube for Schools’, is designed specifically towards educational institutions such as schools (all ages), colleges, and universities, in a bid to bring together the ‘school-friendly’ content on the site into distinct categories to aid teachers in providing video-based lessons.

The move is thought to have come mainly from the fact that with YouTube accessible in schools, students will often get distracted by the latest viral clips, but when school moderators try to prevent this, the usual approach is to block the website altogether, meaning that the site, wanting to promote a middle ground, has developed this compromise system, which blocks out all non-educational content along with all comments pages in order to provide a ‘safe learning environment’.

‘YouTube for Schools’ project manager Brian Truong said of the Google-owned video giant’s reasoning behind creating the new service: “We’ve been hearing from teachers that they want to use the vast array of educational videos on YouTube in their classrooms, but are concerned that students will be distracted by the latest music video or cute cat, or a video that wasn’t appropriate for students. While schools that restrict access to YouTube may solve this distraction concern, they also limit access to hundreds of thousands of educational videos on YouTube that could help bring photosynthesis to life, or show what life was like in ancient Greece.”

With ‘YouTube for Schools’ enabled, member schools (who can sign-up for free) are automatically able to redirect the basic YouTube site onto the educational version when connected to the school’s network, with teachers and administrators given passwords in order to be able to access the website’s full catalogue of content.

With educational advice also in place through a ‘YouTube for Teachers’ sub-category, the new service looks to offer a streamlined approach to accessing educational content, with over 400 subject-themed playlists available upon launch to make it easier for specific content to be found. Will the site help put an end to computer-based distractions in classrooms? A video made by the service illustrating how they plan to achieve this can be seen below:

Crazy Matt Cazzy into all things hi-tech, gizmos and gadgets. If its just out, i want it. Loves watching tv on every device ever invented that can handle it

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