Grade Levels and Standards in YouTube

Last week YouTube added a new upload option specifically for educational videos. Trying that new feature was the inspiration for this week’s post in which I’ll highlight some other YouTube features that are helpful to teachers.

Grade Levels and Standards!

The new feature that YouTube added last week applies when you upload videos to your YouTube account. Now when you upload a video and label it with the “education” category you’ll also see options to apply additional labels for type of video (simulation, demonstration, lesson) education system (by country), grade level, and standard. Here’s my short video about how to find and apply these new options.

It’s too early to tell, but I hope that these new categorization options for academic videos on YouTube will make it easier for students and teachers to locate helpful academic videos.

Timestamp Your Videos

If you’re publishing instructional videos that are longer than five or six minutes, adding timestamps to the description of your video can be helpful to you and your students. Including timestamps in the description lets students click a timestamp to jump to an exact mark in the video. There are a couple of ways that you can do this and they’re both easy to do.

The first option for adding timestamps is to simply type a time like 1:45 into the description of your video and that will then become a hyperlinked timestamp. The other option is to right-click on the YouTube video player while a video is playing. When you right click you can then copy the URL to the specific moment in the video that you clicked on. This video demonstrates both methods.

It should be noted that you can also share timestamps for videos that you haven’t uploaded to YouTube but have simply found on YouTube. For example, if I want my students to watch this Tom Richey history video beginning at the 4:25 mark, I simply right-click on it at the moment and share the link with them.

Create and Share Video Transcripts

When you are viewing a video on YouTube you can open the automatically generated transcript (a feature many people overlook) and then copy the transcript into a Google Doc. Once the transcript is in the Google Doc you can edit the text and text formatting. Additionally, in the Google Doc you can insert links to the corresponding timestamps for the video. Watch this video for a demonstration of how that process works.

Webinar Today!

This Tuesday at 4pm ET I’m hosting Search Strategies for History Students and Teachers. You can register here.

Tech Coaches!

In case you haven’t seen it, I have an ebook that I created with busy tech coaches in mind. It’s titled 50 Tech Tuesday Tips, but the tips work just as well on other days 🙂