YouTube for Schools provides educators with an opportunity to use the many educational materials within YouTube while limiting students’ access to some YouTube videos and functions. Students at districts participating in YouTube for Schools can access video playlists vetted for educational use. A participating district may also create a YouTube playlist to allow students access to materials identified by local schools. Students using YouTube for Schools do not see advertisements, suggested or related videos, comments, or videos that have not been approved. Students cannot play other videos, comment on videos, or login to personal YouTube accounts. Project Share has developed one of the first YouTube for Schools playlists for K-12 schools, allowing Texas school districts to provide educators and students with access to the videos used in Project Share courses, while managing students’ access to other YouTube materials.
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This is a multi-step process. There are currently two different methods, both of which append a specific ID code to your outgoing web traffic, which informs YouTube that it should send back a video without advertisements or comments, allowing K-12 appropriate viewing of approved educational videos hosted by YouTube. Both of these methods work at the firewall / content filter level and will have to be implemented by your district's network / security admins. Detailed instructions are now available at http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1686318. We have created a testing bookmarklet that lets you simulate what you would see behind a properly configured firewall. You can find the bookmarklet at http://ontrack-media.net/techteam/bookmarklets.html. Simply drag the "YT for Schools" link into your browser's bookmark bar, go to a YouTube video that is whitelisted (Khan Academy videos abundant and easy to find) and click the bookmark. Comments and advertisements should disappear and you should be viewing the video as a student would. Clicking the bookmarklet while on a non-whitelisted video typically returns an error somewhere along the lines of "This video is unavailable with the Education Filter enabled. To view this video, the site network administrator will need to add it to a playlist" or possibly a more generic server error message.
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It is important to note that there are two, and only two, levels of whitelisting hierarchy for this program. There is the master / national / global whitelist. This includes all videos that have been added to playlists by any of the institutions in the program, which currently includes the TEA, Chicago Public Schools, Washington DC Public Schools and the Khan Academy. Any video that has been approved by any of these institutions is automatically considered "appropriate" for all K-12 institutions. Here at IPSI we are working with TEA to administer the TEA whitelist, which currently includes all of the YouTube videos used in Project Share coursework. Individual districts may setup their own YouTube for Schools account and receive their own unique ID, which gives them the option of adding their own videos to their own whitelisted playlists. This is as granular as the system is – individual schools / teachers will not have the ability to create their own whitelists nor will any particular end user be able to block any already approved videos from being viewed. In coordination with TEA, we are codifying a set of tags to apply to the videos as we add them to the whitelist, so that it will be visually obvious the grade level and subject matter a particular video was considered appropriate for.
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The official resource for help and general discussion is available at http://groups.google.com/a/googleproductforums.com/group/google-education/topics. This discussion list is actively monitored by technical staff at YouTube. For general questions, you can view the official project FAQ at http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1657123
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Dr. Paula Moeller |
Director,
College Readiness Initiatives |
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