Schools to spend £10,000 on YouTube for pupils

25-1-2010

Schools to spend £10,000 on YouTube for pupils

Schools and councils are planning to spend thousands of pounds so that classes can access videos on YouTube, The Times has learnt.

Up to now most schools have blocked access to the video-sharing website because of concerns about exposing pupils to violent or sexual content. But teachers say that the blanket ban restricts their teaching and prevents them from accessing a mass of educational material on the website.

Dozens of town halls and hundreds of schools plan to spend up to £10,000 a year each on a filter that removes comments on videos and related films. It allows teachers to recommend video content to be placed in a library for other schools with the software to access.

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: “This seems a high price to pay per year for software that only monitors one website.

“It is most important that teachers are able to do their job to the best of their ability and that our children are protected, but local authorities and schools must at all times be mindful of the public purse and the pressure it is under.”

David Mitchell, deputy headmaster at the Heathfield Primary School in Bolton, the first local authority to install the Bloxx Media Filter in all of its schools, said that access to YouTube would improve teaching at the school.

“This will give a big range of tools to help teach the children, to reach those who learn visually in the class,” he said. “It is the comments underneath [the videos] that are disturbing and people are using undesirable language that we don’t want the children to see. But if you can watch them without that then there is a vast resource . . . that you can use to describe a scene or start a debate.”

Teachers say that they would use YouTube to access videos of scientific experiments that are too dangerous or complex to perform in the classroom, scenes from Shakespeare’s plays and footage of other cultures or foreign landscapes. The system is dependent on teachers submitting videos for approval. It then filters out content surrounding the footage and links to other films. A selection of suitable material is then created for other staff to use and for pupils to look at.

Hundreds of schools and 30 local authorities are in talks to buy the filter, which costs between £2,500 and £10,000 a year depending on the number of computers being used. At least 60 councils already use the other web filtering services on offer.

Lesson with a million students

• Two University of Minnesota maths professors created a short video, Moebius Transformations Revealed, which has been viewed more than a million times in the six months since being posted

• Videos put on YouTubeEDU, which was set up for educational postings, include a Stanford University civil engineering professor discussing the Haiti earthquake

• Cambridge University criminologist, Professor Lawrence Sherman, posted a video he made about a long-term experiment investigating crime hotspots in Manchester (Times)