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The popular video-sharing site YouTube is well known for its cutesy kitten videos, how-to tutorials, and serves as an outlet for aspiring singers and performers to showcase their talent—Justin Beiber ring a bell? It's a site that can entertain and "distract" users for hours. No wonder so many school districts have decided to ban the site from their facilities entirely. But restricting the use of YouTube also has its drawbacks—some teachers can't use the free videos that would make teaching lessons oh-so-much easier. Even classics like School House Rock videos (which are often hard to find on DVD due to their age) cannot be easily used because YouTube is inaccessible on school grounds. This also means that it's hard for teachers to share resources found on the site to other teachers in the building. Some teachers go to great lengths in order to share some of these videos—generally requiring students to watch them at home or must buy hard copies of the videos out of their own pocket. But thanks to a few alterations, teachers and students may just be able to use YouTube on school grounds again.
Google, YouTube's parent site, is currently in the works of perfecting a newer version that is exclusively used for educational purposes. It will take obscene and brain killing "distracting" content and will leave in all of the good, free educational channels like the famous Ted Talks, Khan Academy, and other instructional webinars and tutorials that can be used by both students and teachers.
Officially called YouTube for School, the student-friendly site was launched in late December but just recently started earning more recognition and is being adopted by more schools. Not only does this YouTube version only offer educational videos, but it also grants administrators the rights to get rid of any other videos facilitators find unfit as well as the permission to remove "comments" that can get really vulgar and explicit, even on an educational channel. As a bonus the links offered on YouTube for School only links to other educational videos and directs users to YouTubeEDU—an educational library dedicated to primary and secondary education. YouTube for School is an excellent way to allow students to roam the site freely while simultaneously helping teachers come up with better class lessons.
Do you think this is the humbling beginnings of what's to come? Do you think other popular sites should reformat themselves to enrich the growing minds of students?
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This guest post is contributed by Angelita Williams, who writes on the topics of online courses.
She welcomes your comments at her email.
Many thanks to Angelita.
Enjoy your reading!
