There are three things (which means I will probably write about five things) about YouTube I would like to share with you. The first is a challenge...

Number One - Walk the Talk

Firstly, despite the large numbers of videos uploaded to YouTube, most teachers I know have never uploaded a video to YouTube. So if you are a teacher and are thinking about using YouTube videos in your classroom, give yourself a New Year's challenge of actually creating a YouTube account and uploading a simple video.

Keep it down to one or two minutes and video something unique and without people in the video. Do use voice, preferably your own and try to teach someone something.

An example of a very short video that flying instructors use to show students what fuel and water looks like when it is in the same container is here. It is only 47 seconds long but relevant to any student pilot who has never see the two mixed together.

Don't forget to add useful tags (keywords) to your video so people can find your videos.

Number two - Providing controlled access to YouTube for our students

Where I work in education we have strong responsibility to safeguard against the possibility of students viewing inappropriate content on YouTube and recently we approved and are implementing a joint content filtering and role based permissions system for viewing YouTube videos using a combination of the Bluecoat filtering system and our Learning Management System (Moodle) that permits all students to view videos from within YouTube only if they are viewing them via our Moodle Learning Management System.

Our teachers are allowed access to YouTube directly, however those with a student role within our system are not permitted to access YouTube directly.

I am really excited about this for a number of reasons. Teachers can freely research YouTube and select videos to use in the classroom. Students can view the videos from their laptop or computer as long as the video is embedded into a page within Moodle. Because the teacher will have consciously selected the video as being relevant for the class, the content will be stored against a class/year as being appropriate.

Another teacher who reviews that Moodle course with the embedded video will be able to leverage off the efforts of the original teacher or add value by selecting an additional or better replacement video. The students enrolled in the course will be able to view the video without requiring special rights.

This means that a video appropriate for a Year 11 or 12 class but not appropriate for a Year three can be safely cordoned for viewing just by the enrolled students in the Year 11 class.

Additionally if any student attempts to watch the video directly in YouTube rather than as an embedded video in Moodle (which is normally done by right clicking on the video and selecting "watch in YouTube") it will fail as the rule of being in both YouTube and Moodle to be viewable on our network would be broken and therefore the video is blocked.

We have also enabled a YouTube/SharePoint viewing combination as well.

This combination provides teachers with the freedom and flexibility to choose videos suitable for their students while ensuring that students using our school networks do not have unfettered access to YouTube.

As with all things we strive for a balance between freedom to access and our duty of care to the students in our care. This is a great example of combining the two goals. Feel free to contact me for information on this if it is of interest to your organisation.

Number Three - Big Brother is Watching

Over the Christmas Break, I had a little time to look at some videos I had created while living in West Papua


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I had seen the videos before and decided to upload one of them thinking that the background music I had used was from Smartsound which provides royalty free music. Mistakenly, back then I had opted to include "fanfare for the common man" which is licensed to WMG (Warner Media Group) which I found out very quickly (actually within minutes of uploading the video) as I received an email from YouTube saying that I was using copyrighted material. I checked and sure enough I was. I re-edited the video with tracks purchased from SmartSound which I owned back then and should have used rather than opting for a tune that I liked, but did not have the rights to redistribute publicly.

It was an innocent mistake and I mention it because the email from YouTube wasn't heavy, but simply advised me that there was copyrighted content in the video and as a result it was blocked. Of course the reedited version was posted problem free and as a bonus because I also noticed that two other videos sent to me for upload by a friend from Europe contained copyrighted material were also blocked in some countries. After deleting those two videos, YouTube advised me that I now could upload videos longer than 15 minutes which I took as a reward for being copyright compliant.

So, if you are thinking of uploading a video with your favourite "copyrighted" song, think again and look for some creative commons music or purchase some tracks from SmartSound

Oh, and if you were wondering about the video that had the problem, here it is...

Number Four - A great video and an interesting fact

Even though this next video is an hour long... Just watch the first one minute and ten seconds and I believe you will be intrigued...

The end

This entry was posted on December 30, 2010 at 3:44 PM and has received 457 views. There are currently 1 comments. Print this entry.