Close this Advertisement

Streaming Video

YouTube Pilot Targets Schools that Block Access

A recently announced YouTube pilot program, YouTube for Schools, is focused on putting a limited amount of educational content back in schools that currently block access to the site.

The program is accessible as a network setting that administrators can turn on to grant access only to the hundreds of thousands of videos currently catalogued on YouTube EDU. Many of the videos were created by the education portal's more than 600 partners, like the Smithsonian, TED, Steve Spangler Science, and Numberphile.

The library is subdivided into 300+ playlists broken out by subject and grade level.  Teachers are also encouraged to suggest their own education playlist.

"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 video, or a video that wasn’t appropriate for students," wrote Program Manager Brian Truong on the YouTube blog. "While schools that completely restrict access to YouTube may solve this distraction concern, they also limit access to hundreds of thousands of educational videos on YouTube that can help bring photosynthesis to life, or show what life was like in ancient Greece."


   

About the Author

Stephen Noonoo is associate editor of T.H.E. Journal. He is on Twitter @stephenoonoo.

Comments

Tue, Mar 6, 2012 GaryM SBUSD

More information has come to light about this system. Apparently it relies on a school's network edge device (filter, proxy, etc.) to silently insert a custom HTTP header into every outbound request to *.youtube.com.

http://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1686318

YouTube uses the presence of this header to contain and filter your users' access to YouTube content. Requests for any content that isn't within the "EDU Portal", or whitelisted by your site administrators, will be denied.

An interesting solution but currently unavailable to our district as our filtering solution does not support HTTP header rule creation. I still think it would've been much easier to just wall off all this EDU content into a "http://edu.youtube.com" portal.

Thu, Dec 15, 2011 EdC NJ-PS

Gary - My feelings as well. And I thought I was missing something, guess not!

Thu, Dec 15, 2011 Pam New Hampshire

Ditto what GaryM says - this does NOT help us content filter the educational videos!

Wed, Dec 14, 2011 GaryM SBUSD

I still haven't seen a reasonable explanation of exactly how this works. I looked at the YouTube EDU portal and all of the embedded educational videos are being served from the same standard "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v" URLs as the rest of the YouTube content. To use this it will mean lifting *.youtube.com from the blacklist. It is great that YouTube offers a custom portal feature for educators but if it requires a login (active participation on the part of the user) to enforce the edu-restricted viewing it is already a failure. Kids just need to logout to bypass. If I have to open up "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v" in my filter to allow the educational videos I've opened the whole site.

What exactly does it mean, "...accessible as a network setting that administrators can turn on to grant access only to..."? A network setting? Why can't YouTube just serve this portal (and all embedded videos) from a http://edu.youtube.com URLs so we can easily whitelist that? Problem-solved!

Add your Comment

Your Name:(optional)
Your Email:(optional)
Your Location:(optional)
Comment:
Please type the letters/numbers you see above

White Papers:

  • Dallas County School District Overcomes Coverage Gaps with MOTOTRBO Digital Radios PDF screen shot

    Dallas County School District needed to quickly resolve their radio coverage gaps throughout the county for more efficient transportation communication and to ensure student safety. Download this whitepaper to see how this district has found their solution with improved coverage area, clear audio and private communications, in addition to improved efficiency and student safety. Read more...

all white papers