Google Apps for Education Youtube Settings

[ITTech75]

Hi,

 

We love the idea of the Youtube app within Google Apps for Education, but we are really struggling to get this to work. We have created a Test Group of pupils to test this on and we have set up teachers to be able to approve youtube videos. The teacher side of things is working perfectly, they have full access to youtube and can approve videos for students to watch. The student side of things is just not working!

 

Students can still search for obscene words and watch unsuitable videos. We have tried adding CNAME to DNS as the Google instructions tell us but this doesn't make any difference. I have seen numerous post that say how well it works and am getting increasingly frustrated because it appears to be simple!

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks

[Opendium_Steve]

Students can still search for obscene words and watch unsuitable videos. We have tried adding CNAME to DNS as the Google instructions tell us but this doesn't make any difference. I have seen numerous post that say how well it works and am getting increasingly frustrated because it appears to be simple!

 

1. Scroll down to the bottom of the youtube home page as a user who *isn't* logged into youtube and see if it says restricted mode is on or off. If restricted mode is on and it won't let you turn it off the DNS record is working and your problem must be somewhere in the Google Apps settings. If it lets you use unrestricted youtube when you're not logged in then the DNS record isn't working.

 

2. Do an nslookup for http://www.youtube.com from the workstation and see if it shows the DNS record you've added or Youtube's normal records.

[ITTech75]

Hi Steve,

 

Thank you so much for your help. When I am not logged into youtube the restricted mode is on and I am unable to change it. The nslookup returned the restricted.youtube.com ip address. Maybe my idea of restricted is not what i was expecting. For example if I use the youtube search for f**k I can loads of videos returned with this expletive and I can watch them as a student. This is not what I deem to be very restrictive! In an ideal world I would need students to not get any content on youtube apart from content that teachers had approved. I suppose this is not possible???

 

Thanks

[Opendium_Steve]

Thank you so much for your help. When I am not logged into youtube the restricted mode is on and I am unable to change it. The nslookup returned the restricted.youtube.com ip address. Maybe my idea of restricted is not what i was expecting. For example if I use the youtube search for f**k I can loads of videos returned with this expletive and I can watch them as a student. This is not what I deem to be very restrictive! In an ideal world I would need students to not get any content on youtube apart from content that teachers had approved. I suppose this is not possible???

 

I must admit I've not fiddled with restricted mode too much recently. It certainly used to be rather too restricted for most people, but I've just tried it again and am seeing similar results to you, although the results I get with restricted mode off are way more explicit!

 

We do a thing whereby Youtube can be blocked entirely, but allow embedded videos to still be played on whitelisted websites, although that's not quite what you were asking for. I don't think Google themselves offer a way to disable all unapproved videos though. (I could be wrong - there are folks a lot more knowledgeable about GAFE than me around here )