YouTube - Great When It Works, Terrible When It Doesn't
We all know what YouTube is, we've all used YouTube to learn new things, I know everyone has played a YouTube video to enhance a lesson or provide reinforcement of a concept, and we've all been horrified when a not school appropriate ad plays at the end of the video we were just showing our second grade class.

It's important to understand that video is hard to filter.  Which is why we don't.  Instead we rely on Google to filter videos for us.  Students access to video is restricted.  Only videos that Google has identified to be safe for education are accessible.  Thankfully Google makes it easy for us to unblock either an individual video or an entire channel.  We just need 24-48 hours notice.  And a work order. ?


The You in YouTube
We've spoken about using Google Meet to hold an online session with students, parent meetings, etc.  But I also wanted to touch on another option - instead of holding live meetings in Google Meet, you could also record a lesson on YouTube, and share it with students.

To get started, you'll need a device with a camera and microphone.  Your school issued Chromebook, Laptop, iPad, etc, all work nicely.  You can also use your cell phone if you would like (which could also be a handy document camera, hint hint).  For the sake of simplicity, I'll be providing instructions for Laptops and Chromebooks, but iPads and phones shouldn't be too far off from the following directions.

  1. Record your video
    Unfortunately you can't just have YouTube record your video for you. You need software to do this. On a Mac, you have Photo Booth. On Windows 10 and Chromebooks, you have the Camera app. You can also use Google Meet to record a "meeting of one" and it'll save the video file to Google Drive - you'll need to download the file from Google Drive before you can upload it to YouTube.

    Be creative! Use paper taped to the wall to act as a white board. Bring manipulatives and put them on a table in front of you. Put your laptop further away from you so they can see you and the space you are teaching in. Stand up so you can move in the your space and be more engaging. Use your device's screen to show a script or notes that you want to bring up in your lesson.

    If you want to take a more advance approach, you can even use software or apps like Clips and Movie Maker (just to name a couple) to stitch different segments that are recorded separately together.


  2. Upload to YouTube
    1. Head over to https://www.youtube.com. Make sure you're logged in as you.

    2. Click the camera icon in the top right corner, and select "Upload video" from the drop down that appears.

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    3. Drag the video file from your computer to the screen that appears, or click the button to browse for the video file you want to upload.

    4. While your video is uploading, you can now do things like add a Title, a Description, and if you scroll down and click for more options, you can adjust things like disabling comments.

    5. Click Next twice (we can skip step two for our purposes here).

    6. We're now on the Visibility step.  If you just want to share this video with students and not have it discoverable through YouTube search, select Unlisted.  Public is, well, public, and can be seen and found by anyone.  And Private is very restrictive and will most likely cause people to have trouble watching your content.  Unlisted is a good middle ground for most of our purposes.

    7. Click Save.

    8. You're done!  You'll see a link to your video on the screen that you can copy and paste into Google Classroom or any other mechanism you are using to get the word out to parents and students.