9 YouTube Tips and Tricks for Teachers

Posted on the WhiteBoard Blog by Danny Nicholson, adapted by Susan Hennessey

QuieTube http://quietube.com/

• QuieTube gives you a button which you can drag to your toolbar.

• When you see a YouTube video you want to use, click the button and you’ll get a URL which will let you watch just the video. Embed this link into your IWB page to go straight to the video page.

View Pure

• Go to the View Pure website, enter the URL of a YouTube video and it strips out everything but the video. Very simple to use. You can even drag a button to your desktop which does the job. You can also then take the URL of the page you get, and hyperlink to that page.

YouTube XL

• A modified version of YouTube designed to use on large-screen televisions, and so also on Interactive Whiteboards. The interface makes it simpler to use by cutting out a lot of the clutter on the page. There’s no way of hyperlinking to a specific video, but you can add any you like to your Favourites, which you can then access under the Favourites tab on the main YouTube XL screen.

Hyperlink to specific point in a video

• It’s possible to link directly to a specific point in a YouTube video. Play the video, and keep an eye on the white blob that moves along the timeline below the video, (the thing you drag to move forwards/back through the video). When you get to the point in the video that you want to jump to, right click on the blob and choose “copy video URL at current time”.

• If you now use this link as a hyperlink in your IWB software or PowerPoint, the video will start playing at the point that you chose.

Disable related videos

• If you don’t want students to see other content that may be related but unsuitable, then all you need to do is to add ‘&rel=0′ to the end of the url part of the embed code.

Watch in high quality

• Don’t forget that you can choose the video quality of the video, where available. You will able to see the video quality currently being shown towards the bottom right corner of the video. Click on that to see if other settings are available. When displaying on a large whiteboard, choose the best settings your internet connection can cope with.

Subtitles / Closed Caption

• If available, you can turn on subtitles by clicking on the CC button. You can even try a beta service which attempts to transcribe the audio on the fly – although this can be a little hit and miss.

• Click on the CC button and then choose “settings” to change the size, font and colour of the captions.

Interactive Transcripts

Many videos now also have an interactive transcript. Keep an eye out for the Interactive Transcript icon below the video, which looks like this:

Interactive TranscriptWhen clicked, a transcript of all the dialogue is displayed. Each line will highlight in time with the video. Even better, click on a line in the transcript to jump to that section of the video. This is a handy way of jumping to a chosen part of a very long video.

You could also select sections of text and copy/paste into a document, perhaps to make a comprehension activity out of it.