YouTube For Schools - Questions before enforcing...

[RichCowell]

Good Morning All!

 

I'm looking into starting with YouTube for Schools here, but got one major concern before doing any more with it...

 

The music department are one of the biggest users and frequently request it to be unblocked for their rooms - which is fine, but they usually need to get pupils researching all sorts of different music, so it'd be pretty impossible to pre-approve everything they may need - examples of all the different genres / classical / cultural / etc.

 

Has anyone set it up and come across similar issues? Have you found a way around them?

[3s-gtech]

The way around these is to give teachers access to a staff 'approved' account, which is a child account under your school admin. That way they can approve videos themselves, without having overall control. You have to be sure they don't share the login details of course!

[Steve21]

Honestly when we started looking at it, it was decided it's more going to have to be a "like it or lump it" kind of approach. There's only ever going to be a certain amount that can safely be unblocked without doing too much, and if it's not covered in that it would have to be off YouTube. Sounds harsh, but reality

 

Steve

[RichCowell]

The way around these is to give teachers access to a staff 'approved' account, which is a child account under your school admin. That way they can approve videos themselves, without having overall control. You have to be sure they don't share the login details of course!

 

I'd planned to do that, but there could still several hundred different videos that would need to be approved in advance... I know there are certain channels & videos that YouTube have pre-approved, but I'm sure there won't be enough...

 

Definitely needs some work before it's really fit for use...

[Chris_]

The way around these is to give teachers access to a staff 'approved' account, which is a child account under your school admin. That way they can approve videos themselves, without having overall control. You have to be sure they don't share the login details of course!

 

Have you got a link to any more info on this? I've been looking for this but haven't been able to find the feature!

[W32Jbot]

Hi, We had this exact same issue.

 

I approached it by creating a location in smoothwall that encompassed the machines in our music department.

 

Then, with a little bit of help from support, we configured the policies so that the header append that redirects students to youtube/EDU is not applied to this location.

 

Now we have a handfull of music machines with full access to youtube that are closely managed by music staff, and the rest of the students have youtube/EDU.

[3s-gtech]

Not to hand - I just created another Youtube/Google account and turned off al the other services (it goes from being an email address to log in to just a username). Within my school Youtube admin account I could then add it as an authorised account, with me still having overall control.

 

Unfortunately, https filtering was subsequently turned on on the county Smoothwall and that killed it, needs a bunch of firewall exceptions to allow login.