YouTube's Safety Controls - Are they Useful in a Classroom?

For the teachers out there that use YouTube in the classroom, you might want to check out their new safety features. YouTube's new safety mode allows parents and
teachers to filter out unwanted content however, there does seem to be a
few glitches. For example, the first person (whether it be a kid or an
adult) who notices the safety mode button at the bottom of their YouTube
page, can change the settings however they wish.

You can read the full review here.

Take a look at the article and let me know what you think. The new safety features could definitely be useful in the classroom in conjunction with the school's Internet filters, but I'm not sure about its effectiveness.

Tags: internet, mode, safe, safety, youtube

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Permalink Reply by meL on May 7, 2010 at 6:27am

We currently block YouTube entirely - no access to anyone in a school. When I first read about the Safety Mode, I thought yippee!! - but from what I am reading, it would be incredibly tough to manage in a school system. With several hundred computers in each school (I can't imagine a large school dealing with this) it sounds as if each and every computer will have to be touched. New computers being placed would be less of a problem since we have an image for each lab that is ghosted to all the rest of the machines. It would be helpful if access to the Safety Mode was less visible - like Google's search mode - it is there, but not immediately visible.
I was hoping this would allow us to begin using YouTube in our district, but I fear that it is going too be too complicated and not work well enough.