Youtube adds dedicated education channel

[jrsowash]

I recently discovered that Youtube has created a dedicated education channel that I expect will rival iTunesU. It currently focuses on higher education, but I expect that a K-12 version will be added within the next year just as Apple has recently done on iTunes.

I just finished a blog post about the service, but I am interested in your thoughts. What does this mean for education as a whole, and what are the practical applications for classroom teachers?

[Ben Rimes]

Now this is very interesting news! I've been having trouble with Teacher Tube (poor streaming quality, and advertisements everywhere!). If there was some way to un-filter just the educational channels of YouTube, it would give a much more stable platform for sharing video online with students. That and they could subscribe to it via their YouTube accounts, making it even easier for them.

[jrsowash]

I have given up trying to use teacher tube. As you have noticed, there are too many technical difficulties.

Although Youtube has created a dedicated educational video channel, the videos are not hosted under the youtube.com/edu URL so unblocking them is still a problem. iTunesU still suffers from the same issue. The only way that these resources will be unlocked by districts is if teachers raise a ruckus about them being inaccessible on the network.

[jim alvaro]

This is exciting news. How has it gone since April? Did it turn out to be what you thought it to be?

Jim

[jrsowash]

I have been posting "labcasts" on both the iTunesU K-12 channel and youtube. So far it appears that my students prefer using youtube. It's quick and easy. They are accessing my resources from how as, alas, the school web filter blocks both iTunes and youtube.

[Ben Rimes]

Yeah, blocking iTunes is going on in my district too. I think there's going to have to be a big push to either unblock iTunes or Apple is going to have to work on setting up a browser-based method of iTunes so at least the K-12 section can be unblocked.