YouTube is a goldmine for educational content if you can navigate its challenges and utilize its built-in features and settings. Yes, it’s a goldmine for content but it’s also a goldmine for ‘questionable content’ and vide-based whimsy.
In that way, like the internet itself, it’s a kind of circus-mirror reflection of culture–which should make it useful to teachers.
The Official Educator’s Guide To YouTube
For this to happen, you need a little guidance and thankfully they have one. Below is the official YouTube guide for educators put together by the company themselves(Google). Though it hasn’t been updated since 2012 (that we can tell), it’s otherwise actually very good.
Whether you’re using a Flipped Classroom model, increasing your ratio of mobile-to-non-mobile learning, or simply want to increase the presence of digital multimedia in your classroom, stop staring down your nose at it: from TED to Khan Academy, DIY to music, and film to documentaries and self-made snippets, YouTube may be one of the sleeping giant of teaching resources.
See also our guide to YouTube’ing your classroom.
Table of Contents
1. Educational Principles for YouTube
2. Producing Educational Videos
3. Tent-pole Programming
4. Curricula on YouTube
5. Video Optimization
6. Teaching Through Interaction
7. Further Reading and Resources
Introduction from YouTube
“Whether you’re a teacher or learner, YouTube EDU lets you discover, create, and share educational videos. Educational and instructional videos are some of the most popular videos on YouTube.
Use YouTube EDU to find short lessons to supplement your in-school learning, watch full courses from the world’s leading universities, professional development material from fellow educators, and inspiring videos from global thought leaders.
What’s the difference between YouTube EDU, YouTube for Schools, and YouTube.com/teachers?
YouTube EDU is YouTube’s corpus of 700k+ high quality educational videos from partners like Khan Academy, Stanford and TED-Ed.
YouTube created two programs to help schools and teachers utilize YouTube EDU most effectively: YouTube for Schools and YouTube for Teachers.
YouTube for Teachers provides tips & tricks for bringing YouTube into the classroom and organizes YouTube EDU videos to align with common core subjects.
YouTube for Schools allows schools to access all of the YouTube EDU content while limiting access to non-educational content.
How to search and browse YouTube EDU
To find content that suits your needs, try using the use the “Search EDU” bar to limit your queries to education channels. You can also start on the YouTube EDU homepage and browse according to the following three learning segments:
Primary and Secondary: Channels that span from preschool to secondary school, also known as our K12 segment
Higher Education: Channels that include colleges, universities and college departments around the world
Lifelong Learning: Channels for continuing learners that include everything from museums to language instructors”