karlr Posted June 28, 2016 Posted June 28, 2016 We've been using Youtube Edu/Youtube for schools for some time now. It's great - allows us to give pupils access to youtube but limit them to educational content. We could also whitelist individual videos on request. However, I've just noticed that Youtube for Schools is being retired discontinued as soon as this Friday.. The replacement seems to allow us to enable moderate or strict mode on youtube via HTTP headers; fine, easy enough to do in Smoothwall. The problem comes when approving videos - as far as I can tell, you can only approve videos for users that are logged in to a Google Apps domain. As it happens, we do have Google Apps for Education fully configured (with SSO via ADFS) while comparing it to Office 365. It is not currently being advertised/offered to users. I have tested the video approval using Google Apps, and this seems fairly easy and straightforward. The part where it all breaks down is the user experience for pupils when trying to access a whitelisted video on YouTube. They will receive a message saying "This video is restricted. Try signing in with a Google Apps account". Clicking "Sign In" presents them with the usual Google login page prompting for an e-mail address. Typing in a school e-mail address and clicking next triggers the single sign on process and all is well. However, it isn't really desirable for pupils to have to type in their e-mail addresses to sign in to Youtube (or GaFE in general), even if it's only once per session on the computer. Does anyone know of any workarounds to make pupil/staff access to GaFE/Youtube more streamlined? Ideally when accessing any Google services, there should be something in the background that says "ah I see you're from I'll log you in silently". Second best option would be for the sign in to detect the domain when a user manually clicks on sign in. This could be achieved via a HTTP header, custom browser agent etc.
HereIGoAgain2601 Posted July 12, 2017 Posted July 12, 2017 Hi, Don't suppose you ever found a way to get this to work with YouTube? We are just looking at this and would like to get a true SSO to YouTube so we can force students to view only approved content. The restricted view isn't restricted enough for us! Thanks
karlr Posted July 13, 2017 Author Posted July 13, 2017 Unfortunately we never found a graceful way to get the SSO to work for this purpose. Our current solution using Smoothwall is to enable Youtube restrict (moderate mode) for all pupils. We then have a category that we can add youtube video IDs to, and then "ignore" restrict mode for any of these videos. You could potentially do something similar depending on which web filtering solution you use. For example, outright block youtube for pupils, but then allow the URLs to specific videos with a higher precedence than the block.
HereIGoAgain2601 Posted July 13, 2017 Posted July 13, 2017 Thanks, we use a Sophos UTM and it doesn't support this way of blocking videos. We have tried it in the past with help from our support provider and it seems its an allow or block for us when it comes to YouTube. We can put specific URLs to allow in, but the streaming video comes from another domain that is blocked. If we unblock it then the whole of YouTube is visible! Thanks guys, maybe it's just not ready for us to use as yet.
robk Posted October 14, 2017 Posted October 14, 2017 We've been using Youtube Edu/Youtube for schools for some time now. It's great - allows us to give pupils access to youtube but limit them to educational content. We could also whitelist individual videos on request. However, I've just noticed that Youtube for Schools is being retired discontinued as soon as this Friday.. The replacement seems to allow us to enable moderate or strict mode on youtube via HTTP headers; fine, easy enough to do in Smoothwall. The problem comes when approving videos - as far as I can tell, you can only approve videos for users that are logged in to a Google Apps domain. As it happens, we do have Google Apps for Education fully configured (with SSO via ADFS) while comparing it to Office 365. It is not currently being advertised/offered to users. I have tested the video approval using Google Apps, and this seems fairly easy and straightforward. The part where it all breaks down is the user experience for pupils when trying to access a whitelisted video on YouTube. They will receive a message saying "This video is restricted. Try signing in with a Google Apps account". Clicking "Sign In" presents them with the usual Google login page prompting for an e-mail address. Typing in a school e-mail address and clicking next triggers the single sign on process and all is well. However, it isn't really desirable for pupils to have to type in their e-mail addresses to sign in to Youtube (or GaFE in general), even if it's only once per session on the computer. Does anyone know of any workarounds to make pupil/staff access to GaFE/Youtube more streamlined? Ideally when accessing any Google services, there should be something in the background that says "ah I see you're from I'll log you in silently". Second best option would be for the sign in to detect the domain when a user manually clicks on sign in. This could be achieved via a HTTP header, custom browser agent etc. Has anyone been able to make any inroads into this? Being able to trigger a SSO login to G-suite and therefore you tube without having to enter the users email address would be fantastic for us.
Renfield-64 Posted October 16, 2017 Posted October 16, 2017 We just block it completely but allow staff to bypass the filter if they need to. The children in our school aren't old enough to watch Youtube unsupervised anyway.
simpsonj Posted November 3, 2017 Posted November 3, 2017 Unfortunately we never found a graceful way to get the SSO to work for this purpose. Our current solution using Smoothwall is to enable Youtube restrict (moderate mode) for all pupils. We then have a category that we can add youtube video IDs to, and then "ignore" restrict mode for any of these videos. You could potentially do something similar depending on which web filtering solution you use. For example, outright block youtube for pupils, but then allow the URLs to specific videos with a higher precedence than the block. Apologies, a bit of a necro thread, but I can't work out how to do this. Youtube has blocked some videos our English department want to use (About ) and restricted mode has kicked in. I've created a category on Smoothwall and set it to Allow, then whitelist under Web filter policies, and that didn't work. Then tried adding the same category Content Modification, and 'Ignore' and no dice there either. What I have noticed is that when I hit save to add the Youtube URL to the category, Smoothwall makes everything lower case, and Youtube video URLs rely on upper and lower case characters. Any help gratefully received!
karlr Posted November 7, 2017 Author Posted November 7, 2017 Apologies, a bit of a necro thread, but I can't work out how to do this. Youtube has blocked some videos our English department want to use (About ) and restricted mode has kicked in. I've created a category on Smoothwall and set it to Allow, then whitelist under Web filter policies, and that didn't work. Then tried adding the same category Content Modification, and 'Ignore' and no dice there either. What I have noticed is that when I hit save to add the Youtube URL to the category, Smoothwall makes everything lower case, and Youtube video URLs rely on upper and lower case characters. Any help gratefully received! Hi Simpsonj Our specific solution in Smoothwall for this is as follows: * Create a new category called "Whitelisted Youtube videos" or similar * Add Youtube video IDs to the "URL patterns" box for this category (hidden under the "advanced" button). Add one video ID per line. The Youtube video ID is the part after the "watch?v=" part of the video URL, for example "rdklJDAzDKk". The URL patterns list in Smoothwall does not seem to make any changes to the case of the text you enter. * In content modifications create a new policy above the one that applies your "Youtube restrict mode" modification. Set the "what" to your new "whitelisted Youtube videos" category video, the action to "ignore", and specify the Youtube restrict mode content modification. 1
simpsonj Posted November 7, 2017 Posted November 7, 2017 Thank you @karlr it was the URL patterns part I needed
simpsonj Posted November 7, 2017 Posted November 7, 2017 But still no dice... I can see from the web log that the student account is being redirected to restrict.youtube.com when accessing the supposedly unblocked video. Am I missing something glaringly obvious?
karlr Posted November 13, 2017 Author Posted November 13, 2017 Hmm. Are you using the built in restricted mode modification? We created a new modification that enables the "moderate" restricted mode, as detailed here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/6214622?hl=en So our modification is simply "YouTube-Restrict: Moderate" and that is what we ignore for white-listed videos. Are you using any other methods to enable restricted mode? Do the pupils log in to Google? Screenshots of our config below: ---- ---- 1
simpsonj Posted November 13, 2017 Posted November 13, 2017 Yeah, we had the Youtube Restricted mode modification set. Once we removed that (but kept the Youtube Safety Cookie) everything worked fine. Will look at the Youtube:-Restrict: Moderate as an extra safety feature though
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