If you haven't heard You Tube Education officially launched today. It's actually been around for a few weeks but today was the unavailing of the site and the announcement of major content partners.
First, a video:
So basically as as district or school you can (if your filtering allows) unblock just the subdomain of You Tube Education, have access to the content there while keeping the rest of You Tube blocked for end-users. (Now I am not technical when it comes to specific filters so you will have to direct those questions to your IT folks. But in our district we just whitelisted http://youtube.com/education and that was it. Here is the support page if you are tech savvy like that.)
I had the pleasure of talking with James Sanders, the project manager today about the vision for this and some things coming down in the future. I will say, I am pretty excited about this one.
You can search by Category (K-12, Higher Ed, or my favorite, Life-Long Learning). It's great because when you do a search, only the results in the EDU domain are returned.
Now, remember, this is a beginning. It's not prefect and not all the content that you want is in there. But I will say there is a great deal of some super awesome stuff. James wanted me to point out that you can suggest playlists and content you want to be in there by going to the You Tube Teachers Channel and clicking on, you guessed it, Suggest Videos. There you can also sign up to be a content partner and provide content too.
So head over to You Tube Education and check out the great stuff there and if your district blocks You Tube perhaps you can suggest they check it out too.