Most school districts are being true to their efforts to do what’s best for kids and are choosing to use a web filter of some type that blocks inappropriate content. Unfortunately, this often means that great, motivating tools that have wonderful educational potential often also get blocked because the users can’t keep it “clean.” Yes, I’m talking about YouTube! There’s not a tech-savvy teacher out there who hasn’t seen a YouTube video that would be perfect to motivate the video generation that we all deal with today. But finding a way to show the video in your classroom is a nightmare…and if you’re smart enough and have enough time (and fast enough internet connection at home) you can get the video but it hasn’t been easy to do….until now! Follow these steps and downloading, saving and replaying that valuable YouTube video in your classroom is just a few clicks away:
- Go to YouTube and find and preview the video you want to teach with.
- Place your curser just in front of the word YouTube in the web address. (where the asterisk is in this address: www.*youtube.com
- Insert the word kick just in front of YouTube. (should look like: www.kickyoutube.com/blah/blah/blah where blah/blah/blah is the name of the video you want)
- Hit the Enter key…you’re now at KickYouTube’s website and you can follow directions to download the desired video.
Need pictures or more details? Here is a link to more complete directions with images. If you happen to work for my district . . . give me a call and I’ll walk you through this in person the first time you do it!
Grab a flash drive or explore an earlier post I made about drop.io to make transporting your downloaded video easy!