Another way around You Tube being blocked

Another great find on Twitter!  I am constantly getting questions from teachers about videos that they find on You tube, and want to share with their classes.  I received a twitter about this site with several good suggestions for ideas of how to best use http://www.youtube.com/
 as a educational resource, but also some suggestions for getting around the blocking that many school districts do. 

http://www.edgalaxy.com/journal/2010/1/26/the-ultimate-guide-to-youtube-for-educators.html

Like the teacher on this site advocates, I think it is worth considering:  "Rally your techies, school board or whoever to get connected to YouTube, and he provides the evidence to support its case as an educational essential tool"  Here's a good article about "School districts playing it too safe"

In the meantime, my favorite tool for getting around the Youtube blocking is to download and install a very easy program called: ANY VIDEO CONVERTER (I blogged about this before since it is also great for converting Flip videos to wmv's for easy use with movie maker: http://tjmstechtips.blogspot.com/2010/01/some-video-editing-tips.html )

Anyway,  here again is the link for the free download for Any Video Converter:

http://www.any-video-converter.com/products/for_video_free/

Once you download it, INSTALL IT on your computer.

Open the program
Choose FILE,
SET OUTPUT FOLDER (so you can keep track of where your converter files will go)
Under PROFILE  (in the case of converting Youtube videos) you might set the Video Output to be WMV
Then, simply click on CONVERT
The converted file will end up in the folder you designated earlier.

If at home, you can then easily save that converted file to a flash drive and bring into school to play with windows media player.  Woo Hoo...Another similar converter can be found at: http://kickyoutube.com/

In the past I had suggested zamzar as a decent Youtube video converter, and below are my old directions about Zam Zar.  It works but it comes with a bunch of pop-ups and also during the process you have to check your mail (sometimes it might get blocked) you have to return to the zamzar site where it tries to "trick" you into getting the paid for version.  So I really do recommend the free ANY VIDEO CONVERTER program instead.

Anyway,  if you don't want to have to install anything on your computer or can't for some reason, then you might still try using zamzar to convert a You tube video to a windows media player file and have it e-mailed to you. You can then access the file through your e-mail and download the video to your computer and play it that way.


http://zamzar.com/

Once on zamzar you select URL under step #1, paste the youtube video link into the box, Then, In step 2, select wmv under (convert to) / video formats and then type in your e-mail address in step 3. Later, you will receive an e-mail with a link back to zamzar where you can down load the You tube video as a windows media file.  Here is a site that explains more about zamzar:  http://dougpete.pbworks.com/Using-Zamzar-to-Collect-Movies-Offline

30 alternatives to You-Tube:

http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2009/06/30-alternatives-to-youtube.html

Happy You Tubing!