Using YouTube in schools?! Isn’t it banned? Well, yes it is in many schools. For understandable reasons.

So when we saw this article in the New York Times (posted by Andy Smith of TSL Education – thanks again Andy) it caught our interest. The article is about how schools in the US have found ways of filtering content on YouTube to access in class for educational purposes. And now YouTube has developed an educational portal to show specific videos within its own network. It only shows related educational videos too. The comments are removed too – we’re not so sure about that aspect, as surely debate is a good thing, and you can set comments to be approved before they are published. But Google (YouTube’s parent company) is fine tuning the portal and the general move in this direction is to be applauded.

I’m sure YouTube has its reasons for developing YouTubeEDU, as does Apple with iTunesU. But when they both offer the potential to access a range of useful resources, it would be churlish to complain.

Extinct but still popular

Working on a web project – the Museum of Mystery – for schools last year we found that using YouTube in schools was more of an issue than we’d realised. YouTube was a great way to serve up the video content on the project – short clips of experts from the Manchester Museum talking about areas in which they are acknowledged experts – without pupils having to download clips from the website.

But when we trialled the site in schools we found that all of the schools blocked YouTube, so we had to move the video to a private media server. We kept the YouTube channel we’d set up live, even though the videos were no longer fed to the project website, and we’ve kept an eye on the traffic too. One of the videos – about the dodo – has had over 220,000 views and counting!