In the early days of YouTube, it was filled with mostly useless videos of cats and music videos. YouTube now is a great resource for finding video clips related to almost anything you want. You can fix your sink using an instructional video found on YouTube, something I have done, or you can just find out more information about any topic you want. You can even create and post your own videos to YouTube to share with your students or other people. I have posted many videos to YouTube and there are some that I do not use any more but are still getting hits today.
Using YouTube videos in the classroom or with your students can be tricky if you only just share links or show them to everyone. There may be advertisements or links to other videos that are not really appropriate for the classroom or the video may not fit your need as it is. Look over the following tips and methods to find out ways you can go beyond just watching videos and start to use the videos to really assist or improve the learning in the classroom.
Watch the video below and the descriptions after that of the various ways you can go beyond the basics of YouTube.
Remove Ads and Distractions
There are multiple tools you can use to help remove ads and other links from YouTube videos to share with others or just to show in the classroom.
Viewpure
Viewpure is a simple way you can share a YouTube video with students, or show it in class, without all of the ads on the side and bottom of the video. This easily removes some distractions and makes it easier for you to focus on the content of the video. There is a bookmarklet you can install into your browser for quick access or you can use the Viewpure site to search for videos and share them out from there. Ricard Bryne wrote a good description of Viewpure and how you can use it here.
Quietube
Quietube is another simple way you can easily remove ads and other links from YouTube videos. Just install the bookmarklet into your tool bar and then click it whenever you are viewing a YouTube video you want to share with others. You will get a link that you can easily share out or just save for when you want to watch it with students.
Share Only Part of a Video
Tubechop is an easy way you can select part of a YouTube video to share out with others. You may only want students to watch a few minutes of a YouTube video instead of the whole thing, this will allow you to easily do this without having to make sure they know when to start and stop. The page you end up sharing is hosted on TubeChop but you can even embed it onto a site if you want.
Annotate and/or Add Questions
Few people know about the great editing tools available on YouTube for your own videos. You can easily add annotations to your video or even post questions that students need to answer before they can finish watching the video. (This was a beta feature and now has been removed but you can read about other ways to add questions to YouTube videos on apost by Jonathan Wylie.) You can also add a YouTube video to a Google Form to allow for some questioning attached to the viewing of that video. (https://donovanscience.com/2014/05/09/google-form-with-video-to-increase-class-time/) You do need to be the editor of the video to do this but it adds a lot more to the functionality of a YouTube video. The following video shows you how you can do this.
Embed YouTube Onto a Google Site
One of the easiest ways to make it easier to use YouTube videos in the classroom is to just embed the video onto a Google Site. This way, your students have only one place to go to view the videos and you can add other content above or below the video. You can embed a Google Form to have students answer questions about the video or you can provide more resources or links to get them started with the next step in the learning process. You just need to be in editing mode, click “Insert” in the upper left and then select “YouTube”. After that you just need to paste in the url for the video and then select the size and your video will be on your site.
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