7 Ways To Access @YouTube Videos Even If They're Blocked at School

It's hard to believe that one of the top tools for learning as recognized by the Center for Learning &Performance Technologies is blocked in many schools today. Fortunately, innovative educators are resilient souls. If they can't get the learning to their students, the old fashioned way, they'll find another.
In this case, the tool we're talking about is YouTube. As pointed out in Edudemic's 50 Education Tools Every Teacher Should Know About, "Not all schools allow YouTube, but they are missing out as the site contains a wealth of great learning materials for the classroom. There’s even a special education-focused channel just for teachers and students."

So, what's an innovative educator to do if their school is one that blocks YouTube?

Here are some ideas to access YouTube videos.

The 411 for coordinating a Google Hangout On Air

If you thought Google Hangouts were cool, you’ll find Google Hangouts On Air even cooler.  Check em out here.

Hangouts on Air are truly awesome, but coordinating them is tricky and takes some careful planning.  As educators, you’ll want to be especially aware of this because if you are not careful, you can have a situation like the one my friend Angela Maiers shared with me recently. Though it is funny it retrospect, it certainly wasn’t when unknown men joined the Hangout she was conducting and were less than professional.  Not only was it disruptive to the Hangout, but it rendered the recording useless. You can avoid embarrassment, chaos, and appearing unprofessional and unprepared by following these recommendations.

YouTube.com/Teachers Helps Innovative Educators Transform Learning

Schools that have moved from banning and blocking to safely embracing tools like YouTube are able to empower their students to learn with real-world resources.  If you’re like middle school history teacher James Sanders, you may be using YouTube to spark discussions, energize and excite students about various topics, increase instructional time by flipping the classroom, and create playlists for each lesson so students can dive deeper into specific areas that interest them.

Now YouTube.com is taking a more active role in supporting learning. They started last summer with The YouTube Teacher’s Studio. This is a workshop that brought teachers from around the world together to get smart about using YouTube in the classroom. Topics included “Finding your inner Spielberg,” “FlipTeaching,” and Using YouTube as a powerful educational tool. From there, YouTube took these workshops as a springboard to launch a new site called YouTube.com/Teachers.

Google Launches YouTube Edu

I recently wrote YouTube University – An Interesting Opportunity for Innovative Students and Teachers. Well now this idea is getting a boost as recently reported in the Wall Street Journal's story YouTube Edu Launches. From the story:

"YouTube launched a new section of its site Thursday that organizes the video channels of more than 100 colleges and universities.

The section, called YouTube Edu, is the result of about a year’s work on the part of Google employees using their 20% time for outside projects, said Obadiah Greenberg, a partner manager at YouTube. Several of the search giant’s products and services, including Google News and its social-networking site Orkut, had a similar start."

The popular educational blog ReadWriteWeb said this:

This is a great idea and we expect that young people who discover it will appreciate it. At first glance it looks better to us than iTunes University. This could genuinely help young people make more informed decisions about what schools to apply to. There's also a lot of great content on the site for anyone to learn from. If you like academic videos, make sure to check out Academic Earth as well.

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Note to pre-k to 12 educators. Youtube has mixed the edu content in with the rest of the site – no separate URL, no dedicated directory. This makes it impossible for school systems like the NYC DOE to unfilter just the edu content. This may be an intentional strategy on the part of Youtube to try to get the whole site unblocked rather than provide a separate, dedicated space for instructional content. As a result it will be difficult for schools to take advantage of this resource across a school. Innovative educators may be able to come up with creative workarounds such as computers that are on an unfiltered line specifically for these students who would be monitored, or this can be an afterschool option for some students like the one in my post YouTube University – An Interesting Opportunity for Innovative Students and Teachers.

To read ideas on how this site can impact education visit the discussion at Youtube EDU.

Facebook Find: YouTube University – An Interesting Opportunity for Innovative Students and Teachers

I remember my very first day in college. Being an innovative student, I figured out a way to begin college while I was still in high school and took a class as a non matriculated student to get a taste for the experience and a head start on my college career. Whoa! I was in for a shock. I was taking a Psychology 101 class in an auditorium setting with a professor at the front of the room lecturing to us all. There was little to no interaction and I was wondering why I really had to be there, and if the professor even really knew I was there at all. I soon learned the ropes of 101 classes which were depicted so well in the 1980s teen comedy Real Genius which coincidentally came out the same year. The movie has a great visual gag that has stuck with me over the years. In an otherwise clichéd montage of college life, we see the scene of a professor lecturing to a room full of students, along with a few tape recorders on empty desks. A few scenes later, we see the same professor lecturing to a room now filled with more tape recorders than students. In the final scene, he’s not there at all. In his place stands an enormous reel-to-reel tape deck playing the lecture to a room full of tape recorders.

Many college freshmen might share that not much has changed since then. Unless they happen to be a student in Richard Buckland’s class. Buckland, a senior lecturer at the University of NSW in Sydney, Australia, was frustrated that high school students with a passion for computing and capable of studying at the college level were not able to make the commute to the university fit into their school day so, as I discovered from today’s Facebook find from my Personal Learning Network colleague Will Richardson,

Buckland turned YouTube into a remote classroom where the students could attend lectures virtually and complete coursework. Buckland is dipping his toes into the 21^st century waters by posting his lectures online and providing select innovative high school students the opportunity to watch the lectures, do the course work, and…get college credit-for FREE!

This is a step in moving toward what some predict will become an increasing online educational experience. What I love about this option, is once the video is posted, it provides students with a forum to interact via commenting on and rating the videos. It also brings the opportunity to students who may have a difficult time attending classes as was the case for both me and my mother. When I began this endeavor, I was too young to hold a driver's license and needed a special waiver to be allowed to drive to class. It was not easy for my working mother to convince the state that her 15-year-old needed a license. My mother also had difficulty in college, often missing classes and struggling to catch up due to medical issues. This opportunity would have made college much more accessible in our cases, and as you can imagine, many others.

Beyond accessibility, this innovative idea has advantages on all sides. In this case, providing students an opportunity to engage in more challenging coursework, receive college credit, and begin to get a feel for potential colleges, and…providing colleges the opportunity to get to know their potential students, and giving current students a unique, and in many cases, more attractive option for their coursework.

Visit the original post at Forget iTunes U: Students Now Getting College Credit via YouTube.

See other classes at http://www.youtube.com/edu.