Welcome to episode 11 of Tech Tuesday! Hi, my name is Darcie Priester and I’m an Instructional Technology Resource Teacher at a high school in Northern Virginia.
In this video series, I spotlight edtech tools, show you how to integrate them into your classes and keep you in the know on the latest edtech news.
This week I’m focusing on how to use YouTube. This episode will be more about the basics: I’ll look at how to upload videos to your own channel, create playlists, link to other videos, and a couple other tidbits! But there’s some more advanced features I also want to cover, so part 2 will be in the next episode. Let’s jump into it!
I’m seeing teachers rely on YouTube so much more in this time of remote learning, especially in creating their own instructional videos for students. But with that, I’m getting a lot more questions about how to do things in YouTube as well and I figured it was time to create a video showing how to use the most common features.
CREATING A CHANNEL
Let’s start with creating your own channel. Everyone who asks me about this thinks that this is a really hard thing to do, but it’s not nearly as complicated as it sounds. If you have a Google account, you already have a YouTube account as Google owns YouTube and therefore especially if your account is through your school, already have a YouTube channel, but probably don’t know it!
You may not have created content to upload, but if you’ve ever saved videos or subscribed to other channels, or have created playlists, these will already be on your channel as you can see here. This is an account that I’ve never uploaded a video too, yet, there’s content here.
However, if you have a brand new Google account, then you will need to create a channel. Before I show you how, you need to consider how you are going to utilize this channel. Is this going to be a place where you put instructional videos for students in your classroom and therefore it’s simply a classroom channel or are you considering becoming a math coach or a trainer and may want your own brand, like Ditch That Textbook?
YouTube has two different ways to set this up depending on your answer. To create your channel, go to YouTube and click on your account icon in the upper right corner and select “create a channel”. This is where your answer comes in, as you will create a channel with either your actual name, this would be more for classroom teachers, or create a brand or use another name. If it’s the first option, it will confirm your Google account and you’re all set!
If it’s the second option, you have a few more steps as you will need to first create a brand account and then your channel. If this is something you are interested in, here’s the link to the YouTube Brand support page that fully describes how a brand account works.
Okay, now that we have a channel set up, you can start uploading your own videos! From the top of any page on YouTube, click this camera icon and select the video you want to upload. While it’s processing, you can start putting information in for your video. You can add a title and description, as well as copy the URL link to the finished video. If you keep scrolling down, add a thumbnail picture that shows what’s in your video. You can also add it to a playlist. For example, whenever I upload a new Tech Tuesday video, I put it in the Tech Tuesday episode playlist so it can easily be found on my channel.
The next option, I need to explain a little bit. In November 2019, COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act was passed. This affected many websites and educational companies, including YouTube. In order for your video to be uploaded, you must select if your video is made for children or not. And it’s not the easiest thing to determine. YouTube does give some guidance though and I’ve included the link to determine if your video is “made for kids” here.
If you choose the option “made for kids”, I do know it stops ads from playing, which is helpful, but it also stops notifications, such as to subscribers of the channel from being notified that a new video has been uploaded. That doesn’t help me, and really my content is for teachers, not students. So for my part I choose the “not made for kids” option. You will have to make the right decision based on the type of videos and age levels you teach.
Once, you’ve made that decision, then click on more options. This is where you can add tags, describing what’s in your video, and determining the language of your video, adding subtitles and more. Next, you can add some video elements. Most of the time, I think you’ll skip this, but I do want to point out one special feature called “Cards”. You may have noticed that in some of the previous episodes I point to the corner and say “go watch this video” and a little white box with the title of a video appears. This is linking to another video within YouTube and it’s called a card. You may have the occasion to want to link another video into your video. To do this, click on cards, and find the place you want to add the video, then paste in the link to the video and you’re all set!
Finally, the last two choices you need to make are visibility and publishing. First, is this video going to be public, or unlisted, as in you share the link with only the people you want to have view it, or private, meaning only for yourself? And do you want to schedule the video to be published right away or at a future time? Now your video is uploaded to YouTube!
YOUTUBE STUDIO
I realize that’s a lot of options to choose from and you may not know which ones you want at the time you are uploading your videos. Not to worry, because you can add them later. Once your videos are uploaded, you can access the edit options in YouTube Studio. Once again, click on your account icon in the upper right corner and select YouTube Studio. Here you’ll find your dashboard where you can see your channel’s analytics with a summary of the number of subscribers, top-rated videos and more. In the navigation on the left, you also get more options. Click on videos and this will take you to a page with all of your uploaded videos.
This is also where your videos go if you export them from WeVideo. When you are finished editing a video in WeVideo and ready to process it, you can choose to export it via WeVideo, or other options such as Google Drive or YouTube, if this turned on in your district. In my district, YouTube is only turned on for teachers. Students can export finished videos to their Google Drive. This is often what I recommend for our students, as it creates a backup or they can easily share it with teachers or copy the URL to turn it in for Canvas. If you choose to export your video to YouTube, you can then follow along with the next steps.
When you hover over a video, you will see several options. The pencil icon allows you to make changes to the details of your video, such as the description and if you want to add a card. The next icons to the right allow you to view the analytics of the individual video, comments for the video and view the video on its own page on YouTube. The three dots give you more options such as getting a quick shareable link to the video. You can also change the visibility and see if there are any copyright claims on your video.
What is a copyright claim? If you upload a video that contains copyright-protected material, the companies that own that material will issue a claim that they own it and this could affect your account. Does this mean you are in trouble? Most likely not, but you should take care of the claim. Most of the copyright claims I have seen have to deal with music.
You have a few choices of what to do:
Remove the background music. If you have music in the background of your video, you can remove the song without having to edit and upload a new video right within YouTube.
Swap the music. If your music is in the background, instead of removing it, you can swap out your audio track with another one. You may not be aware that YouTube has a gallery of free music and sound effects in their audio library. You can search this gallery by a number of filters including genre, instrument, and duration of music or the sound effects by category. This is where all of the music for Tech Tuesday comes from.
A few of the music tracks do require attribution, so make sure that when you play a selection you pay attention to the text under the title of the selection as to whether it’s free to use with any of your videos or if you will need to copy and paste the designated text in the description area of your video.
Trim out the affected content. Within YouTube Studio, you can view the portion of video that includes the claim. End points will surround the portion and it will be removed from the video, again without having to upload a new video.
Dispute the claim. If you feel you have the required rights to use the content in your video, or if you think the system has somehow misidentified your video, you can dispute the claim. If you dispute, the copyright owner will be notified and they’ll have 30 days to respond.
However, the owner of the copyright material may have your video taken down and when that happens your account receives a penalty called a copyright strike. If you get 3 strikes within 3 months you can lose access to your account. You can get the strike cleared if you attend YouTube Copyright School and wait 3 months for it to expire and still use YouTube during this time. This is an extreme circumstance and for how you’re using YouTube, you most likely won’t ever see this happen, but it’s good to know what this all means in case you do.
SUBTITLES & CAPTIONS
YouTube also allows you to add subtitles or captions to videos too. Why is this something you would want to do? First, if students are watching outside of class or are at home for remote learning, there are times when they can’t turn on the audio. So having subtitles or captions allows them to still view the video and understand the topic or lesson. Having subtitles also helps boost comprehension with all students and helps those whose first language is not English better understand, as well. Finally, studies have shown that viewers who watch captioned videos are 91% more likely to watch the video to completion.
There are two ways I suggest for uploading subtitles to YouTube. The first is to upload a text file. You can upload this right after uploading the video or return later to YouTube Studio, click the pencil icon and then the “more options” tab. Scroll down and click on “upload subtitles/cc” and choose either with timing or without. Most of us won’t know the timing of the words with the video so select “without timing” and select the text file.
The other way is to click on “subtitles” from the left-side navigation in YouTube Studio and on “published” under “subtitles”. Then click “edit” and then go through the text as the video plays, fixing text, capitalization and grammar. Then save changes.
CREATING PLAYLISTS
The last feature I want to cover is creating a playlist. If you aren’t familiar with this, its creating a list of videos covering a certain topic that you can then share out with students to watch. So let’s say I want my students to create a stop motion animation video of any process we’ve covered in class this year. I want them to understand what this is and give them examples. So I can search YouTube for videos that work and save them all to one list. I can add a video to a playlist by clicking on the 3 dots from the results page and click “save to playlist”. Then select the playlist I want to add it to or create a new playlist, name it and decide its visibility: public, unlisted, or private. Or go to the specific page for that video and select “add to” and add it to a playlist.
Your saved playlists will be accessible from your YouTube Channel. Select “playlists” to view the ones you have created. To share a link to that specific playlist, select “view full playlist” under the playlist you want to share, then click the arrow icon and copy the URL or share it through one of these other sites or embed it. Don’t worry about having too many videos in one playlist as there currently is no cap. However, from an educational standpoint, I would say no more than 10 videos are probably enough to get the point across.
YOUTUBE VIDEO APPROVAL
Lastly, in my school district, I help approve videos through the YouTube filter. As you may have seen on some of the example videos shown in this episode, some videos have an “approve” button underneath them. When I click this, that specific video is then approved for teachers and students to view. If you have created your own channel for your classroom, I can approve the entire channel if you send me the correct URL. To find this URL, go to your channel and copy the URL in the omnibox at the top.
Now oftentimes, I will have a teacher send me a link to a website with an embedded YouTube video that students can’t watch, because it needs approval. But it gets confusing as to what needs to be unblocked or approved, whether it’s the whole website, a specific page, or the video. To make it easier for everyone involved, if it’s just the video that needs approval, you can click on the YouTube icon in the embedded video and copy and paste the direct URL for the video in an email and I can approve it. If it’s the website or page, I will instead contact IT for unblocking.
IN THE NEXT EPISODE
I’ll have more to share about the advanced features of YouTube, so don’t forget to hit the subscribe button to keep up to date with all of my videos.
Ms Priester EDU 