Using YouTube to Share Lessons This Fall? - Settings and Tools You Need to Know About

This fall many of us are using YouTube more than ever before to share lessons with students. Whether those lessons are ones you recorded or ones that you found YouTube, there are some settings and tools that you should know about. 

Settings and Features When Sharing Your Own Video Lessons

• You can make your videos unlisted and still share them in Google Classroom or any other learning management system that you choose to use. 
• You can and probably should disable comments on the video lessons that you upload. By doing this you avoid the hassle of dealing with YouTube spam comments. I post my videos in Google Classroom and let kids can ask questions there. 
• Add a cover image to your video to let students know what the video is about. Doing that also avoids using the still frame that YouTube selects at random for your cover image. That function and more are covered in this video. 
• If you use a recording of a Zoom or Google Meet as part of a lesson that you upload to YouTube, use the blurring function to hide the faces of students who don't want to be in the video. That feature is demonstrated in this video. 

Settings and Tools When Sharing Videos You've Found on YouTube

• It is possible to collaborate with another teacher to make a playlist of educational videos. This is a good option for those who work in teaching teams. Here's a video on how to collaborate on a playlist. 
• Watchkin, SafeShare, and Quietube are simple third-party tools that you can use to display videos in your classroom without displaying the related sidebar content found on YouTube. 
• Put videos into Google Slides or PowerPoint and that will let you share videos with your students without forcing them to see the sidebar content from YouTube. A bonus aspect is the option to specify a start and end time for a video in a Google Slide. 
• Put video links in Wakelet collections or on Padlet walls to share videos without having to make students see the sidebar content from YouTube. 
• Create a lesson from an existing YouTube video by using EDpuzzle. EDpuzzle lets you add questions into the timeline of a video. Students have to answer the questions in order to advance to the next section of the video. My complete overview of EDpuzzle can be seen here. 

"Why Do We Have Fall?" - A Post Inspired by My Daughter

 

"Why do we have fall?" That was the question that my four year old asked while we were walking in the woods yesterday.  It was a good question (she's full of good questions these days) and I tried my best to explain that different times of the year have more or less sunlight which makes the plants grow or "hibernate" (a concept she's learned from National Geographic's All About Bears). When she's a little older we'll worry about covering more of the details. In the meantime, if you have elementary school students who are wondering "why do we have fall?" here are a couple of good little videos on the topic. 

Why Are There Seasons? from SciShow Kids is a good video lesson about seasons. The video is appropriate for students in primary grades. 

 

Reasons for the Seasons is a TED-Ed lesson appropriate for upper elementary and middle school students. The lesson explains the relationship between the shape of the Earth's orbit around the Sun, the Earth's tilt on its axis, and how those affect the amount of sunlight on different areas of the Earth.