Sharing Videos with Students

Many districts (including my own) have restrictions set up for videos that are accessible on YouTube.  With good reason, too; there is a lot of garbage out there.  However, there are a lot of great resources available on YouTube, and often teachers come across a great video to share with their students and they are left with few options to be able to share the video with the kids.  Here are some suggestions to make this a little easier.

Step 1 - Is the video worth showing?

Step 2 - Check to make sure it is accessible at school

Internet filters and computer or chromebook restrictions do a good job at preventing users to access undesirable material (sometimes too good).  So, even if you have reviewed a YouTube video and have determined that it is a good fit for your class, your technology may not allow you to access it.  Check to make sure you can access it at school as you expected.

Step 3 - Workarounds

If you can't access the video at school as expected, you have some options.  Some disclaimers before you start doing this:

1. Check with your supervisor.  You have excellent intentions in providing your students with this information, no doubt, but you want to make sure that by working around your district's internet policies your supervisor is okay with this.
2. Have a system in place where you are sharing information with your students.  Often, this is an LMS like Google Classroom, Canvas, itslearning, Moodle, etc.  You'll need accessible cloud storage (like Google Drive) to store the video and a place where your students can access and view it.

With those two items being taken care of, you have the ability to download your vetted YouTube video to your computer, store it in Google Drive and share with your students via Google Classroom.  There are a number of sites and tools that do this.  I recently came across this tool, and it worked as expected, without installing any additional programs on my computer or giving me a bunch of annoying ads.  It's pretty explanatory and you can check it out here:

NOTE:  There is a chrome extension available for this.  I don't recommend installing it; not because I have any experience with ill-effects of this particular extension, but I do exercise extreme caution when installing any extensions because of risks of malware and other security issues.  The website itself does what it needs to do, and an extension in my browser just seems unnecessary.