Youtube in schools

[phil0569]

Just like to get others thoughts on the use of Youtube in school. We used to block access to Youtube for students through PCE and allow staff full access. We then decided to use the Youtube Educational filter from Google. This was a bit of a pain to set up with Link2ICT, but we managed it and it worked really well for a number of months. The problems have now strated to occurr, with staff getting play errors all the time. It took a lot of chasing down but we think it has something to do with the way Google interacts with Youtube now.

 

So we have a system that works for the students but doesn't work for staff. Next thoughts was dam with it all and just let everyone have access. Do any other schools just give free range to Youtube to their students? Has anyone else got a better alternative?

 

One thing to note was that when we had PCE doing the filtering, and with the Edu filter you can still access the site over Https. So opening it up, would there be any difference?

[Michael]

It may have something to do with Google forcing YouTube into HTML5 mode for all users, rather than using Flash or HTML5.

 

I've also noticed a lot of clients displaying red PCE icons in the notification area (bottom right) instead of blue, and normally this is an indication there's no internet connectivity or possibly an issue with the Link2ICT PCE server it talks to their end.

 

Personally I don't think using PCE is the best way to manage YouTube. There are other filtering products out there which allow you to categorise YouTube clips just as you can web pages, but not something Link2ICT currently offer.

 

As you rightly pointed out, it's not difficult to get around what PCE offers, plus (in my opinion) I don't think their upcoming cloud offering is the way forward. It looked clunky, relies on Java (which is unsecure as hell) and you need a specific browser on the iPad - so you can't use Chrome for example. You also have to question whether being cloud based, it'll most probably eat all of your bandwidth very quickly, as presumably it'll need a constant channel open to talk to the cloud?

[TechMonkey]

Yesterdays discussion on this