Youtube - Once Banned, Now Part Of Course

Educators are giving YouTube — long dismissed as a storehouse of whimsical, time-wasting and occasionally distasteful videos — another look. As Google, YouTube’s parent company, fine-tunes a portal that lets schools limit students’ access to selected content, the video-sharing Web site is gaining popularity as a trove of free educational materials.

Schools across the country commonly block access to YouTube, shielding students from the irresistible distractions of, say, the cat in a T-shirt playing a piano, or worse. So in December, Google started YouTube for Schools, offering schools the ability to pluck only the videos they want, scrubbed of all comments and linked only to other related educational videos. The program gives schools the ability to allow access to the YouTube EDU educational library, and to specific videos within its own network — while blocking the general site.

Original source here.