YouTube’s main audience is thousands of screaming teens. Having the site blocked by lots of high schools across the U.S. isn’t doing anything to help YouTube. So instead of working against high school administrators who deem most of the video site’s content unfit for an educational institution, YouTube has been working to provide schools with video content that can be censored. The new YouTube outfit is called YouTube EDU and it’s proving to be wildly popular with schools across the nation already.

Not only does the new YouTube venture make showing videos easier for teachers, but it’s proving to be an excellent way to provide students with a free educational source. Districts that are staved for funds are turning to sites like YouTube to find information and videos that truly are educational and worthy of viewing.

‘˜’’YouTube: Educational Content, Really!’’’

Now that YouTube has created YouTube EDU, high school students across the nation are going to benefit from this creation. While, given the option, kids might not watch educational videos, there are plenty of the educational-type videos available through YouTube. All kids of science, history, and other subject-centered videos can be found on YouTube. In fact, the popular video site is even used by some professors seeking a bit of additional information.

Teachers are also showing students videos from YouTube, and this is greatly benefiting public school districts that are currently undergoing financial strain. YouTube is, after all, a free service and not taking advantage of a free service that proves to be an excellent teaching tool for students would be a huge mistake. A number of school districts have already lifted bans on teachers using YouTube as a teaching tool, though it won’t be too long until students in many districts can access this free tool as well.

‘˜’’A Better Way to Show Videos’’’

Some districts didn’t ban YouTube entirely. Instead, these districts allowed teachers to use YouTube content that had been pre-approved. The problem with this type of allowance was that waiting for a YouTube video could take weeks, and often the view in-question would no longer be approved once the process was complete. For obvious reasons, this type of system simply didn’t work and few teachers bothered combing YouTube for appropriate videos.

Other teachers who felt that YouTube video was particularly educational would attempt to download that video at all costs (either by uploading it to another site or asking a student to get around the school’s restrictions according to a recent Bloomberg article titled “YouTube Subtracts Racy and Raucous to Add a Teaching Tool”). Now, with YouTube EDU, teachers can simply use the YouTube filtering process to find videos that fit within a school’s guidelines. There’s no doubt that soon all kinds of school district filtering will disappear to make way for tools that are really quite educational. The only problem now is how are students going to cite information taken from YouTube? Presumably, this is a citation problem that the MLA will have to start working on soon!