Hard to believe, as it has become so ubiquitous, but YouTube is five years young today…..

Students in 1st and 4th year particularly spend a lot of time on media projects (web design, presentations etc.) and a challenge they always face is how best to download/display media from websites like YouTube.  We’ve been using a few different options this year such as TubeTV for OS X and DownloadHelper for Firefox.  Both have their uses and DownloadHelper is particularly useful when used in conjunction with iExtractMP3, which allows you to rip an MP3 file from any .flv.

iWeb allows you to embed media files from the likes of YouTube, using Web Widgets.  However, sometimes you need to download a video in a format that allows you to edit it before embedding, for example.  The best tool we’ve come across for this purpose in recent months is Keepvid.  With Keepvid, you can copy and paste any URL from and website with embedded media and download a copy of video media in mp4 format.  Best of all, Keepvid is free, online and very, very fast.

YouTube Edu is a new channel from YouTube aimed mostly at third level.  However, it also contains a lot of useful information for second level students and teachers, such as historian Martin Gilbert on World War II, below.  In Alexandra College we have full access to YouTube anyway, but the majority of schools in Ireland use NCTE broadband which blocks YouTube.  YouTube Edu, however, will of no value to schools using NCTE broadband as the site links to videos on the main YouTube website.

A useful one for teachers – how to link to a specific part of a video on YouTube.  This could speed up prep time at the start of a class – you could link to the video from your course in Moodle.  http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/link-to-youtube-minute-second/