If you’re a teacher, there's a good chance that you use YouTube. Whether you send students to your own videos or someone else's, I think you’ll find many of the pointers on this page particularly handy.
When searching for videos on YouTube, you can refine your search by using filters. To see the Filters menu, first type your search query in the box at the top of any YouTube page. You’ll see the Filters icon on the result page. Clicking that icon to display a variety of ways to narrow your search, including the ability to limit results to recent videos. It can also be handy to filter by duration when you’re looking for short videos.
You can adjust the speed at which a YouTube video plays. You can play a video at 1.25, 1.5, or 2 times the normal speed to watch a video in less time. Alternatively, you can make a video play at a slower speed to make sure you have time to digest every word.
The keyboard shortcut to increase playback speed is Shift + >. To slow down the speed, it’s Shift + <.
Watch YouTube videos without distractions in a family-friendly environment at watchkin.com. You can search for videos on Watchkin or paste a video’s URL. You can then provide Watchkin’s video link to students. The link opens a clean page with the video—no ads, comments, and related videos.
Long videos can be an information overload. Shorter clips with time to think, discuss, and apply can help learner better understand the content. You can use Google Slides to chop up a video into segments. After inserting a video on a slide, select the video and click the Format Options button and expand Video Playback in the side panel. You can specify the start and end times for the clip. You can also include instructions, questions, and links on the slide. You can duplicate the slide and change the start and end times for the next segment. Repeat this as many times as needed.
While YouTube has the ability to creative playlists, they are not very useful because “Made for kids” videos cannot be added to them. One way to easily save and share collections of YouTube videos (and other content) is with the Wakelet browser extension. While viewing a video, simply click the extension’s icon and choose to add to a collection. Opening the collection gives you sharing options.
YouTube has keyboard shortcuts to control playback. Pressing the F key while viewing a YouTube video makes the video go full screen. You can press F again to exit full screen. The spacebar pauses and resumes playback. The right and left arrow keys jump the video forward or backward five seconds. If the keyboard shortcuts are not working, click inside the the YouTube player and try again.
Bonus Pointer: While paused, you can press the period key [.] to advance one frame. Pressing the comma key [,] goes back one frame.
By adding _popup after the watch (but before the ?) in a YouTube video’s URL, anyone who follows the link will see the video in full screen. The comments, sidebar, Like buttons, etc. will not be shown. Of course, clicking the video’s title or the YouTube logo will open the page on YouTube. Unfortunately, suggested videos still display at the conclusion of the video.
You might notice that the URL with _popup redirects to a URL that looks something like youtube.com/embed/LiH2bw. You could choose to share this “embed” URL, and it would also open he video in full screen.
You can create a link to a YouTube video that begins playing at a specified time. This is a great way to skip right into the content you want your audience to view.
When playing a YouTube video on a desktop computer, press L to leap forward 10 seconds and J to jump back 10 seconds. This doesn’t work while an ad is playing, but these shortcuts are useful for skipping ahead and for instant replays.
So you want a video to continuously repeat? You can do that with YouTube! When a video is playing, right-click (or click with two fingers) anywhere on the video. A menu appears and one of the options is Loop.
While playing a video on YouTube, it’s handy to know keyboard shortcuts for controlling the sound, particularly when showing a video to a large group. Pressing M on the keyboard will mute the sound. Pressing M will also unmute the sound. Additionally, you can press the up and down arrows keys to raise or lower the volume in 5% increments. Ultimately, it is probably easier for you to adjust your computer’s volume instead of using YouTube’s volume controls.
Most videos on YouTube have captions. If a video’s owner does not provide captions, YouTube will usually automatically generate them. You can instantly turn YouTube’s captions/subtitles on by pressing C on your computer’s keyboard. Want to make the caption’s text size larger? Press the + key. Want to make the text size smaller? Press the - key. Want to turn captions off? Press the C key.
For a YouTube video with captions, you can view the full captions transcript and jump to specific parts of the video. You need to be viewing a video on a computer to open the transcript. Do that by clicking More (the three dots) and choosing Open Transcript. If you click a line of the transcript, the video will begin playing from that line’s associated time code. Use your web browser’s Find option (under the Edit menu or with the shortcut Command/Control+F) to search the transcript for words and phrases.
Get the free browser extension from YiNote.co. Then, when viewing a video, you can open a side panel for taking notes. Notes are saved in your browser and available the next time you come back to the video. Clicking the Upwards Arrow button opens a page that displays each note next to a screenshot and timestamp. You can even highlight and draw on the screenshot!
You can export notes to PDF, Google Drive, OneNote, and Evernote.
YiNote works with more than just YouTube. It works on web pages where it can detect a video. It also works on downloaded videos that you open in the browser.
🔥 Tip → It's very easy to make some words **bold** and other words *italic*. Just simply enclose words in double or single asterisks.
The notes are stored locally in in your browser’s storage, but you can export the notes as a JSON file and import them into another computer or browser.
You can use the YouTube Audio Library to get hundreds of free songs and sound effects to use in your videos. Most of the music in the library requires no attribution, but some songs do require you to include credit in your video’s description.
You’ve got three privacy choices when uploading a video to YouTube. You can leave it Private where only you and people you invite via email can view the video. You can set privacy to Public where your video shows up in search and can be seen and shared by anyone. Or, you can set it to Unlisted. I typically choose Unlisted because I’m not interested in my videos showing up in search, but I do want anyone with the link to be able to see the video. Even with an unlisted video, I prefer to disable commenting and ratings.
If you don’t change any Advanced Settings, viewers can post comments that will immediately appear beneath your video. My videos have received off topic and inappropriate comments in the past, so I now avoid bad comments by turning them off.
It’s not too late to change the privacy settings for a video you’ve already uploaded. You can edit a video’s settings at any time.
A YouTube video’s thumbnail is like a book’s cover: it tries to draw the reader to see what’s inside. A video’s thumbnail appears when embedded, on YouTube in a search, in a Related Videos listing, and in playlists. After uploading a video to YouTube, you see three thumbnail options that YouTube automatically pulls from your video. Chances are that none of those are the perfect thumbnail. The fourth option is to upload a custom thumbnail. You can upload just about any image to use as the thumbnail. I like to save a frame from my video (or take a screenshot) from one of the best moments. Then I bring that image into Google Drawings so that I can add word art and any other embellishments. I then download as a JPEG so that I can upload it as a custom thumbnail to YouTube.
Word art is great for thumbnails because you can give the text a fill color and a contrasting border color. That kind of combination will show up no matter what is behind it. I also like to add a drop shadow to make the text show up even better.
Canva has alternative to using Google Drawings to create a thumbnail. They have a tool for making eye-catching YouTube thumbnails at canva.com/create/youtube-thumbnails.
Adobe Spark also has a YouTube thumbnail maker at spark.adobe.com/make/youtube-thumbnail-maker.
If you upload a somewhat long video to YouTube, you can add time links to its description. Viewers can click a time link to jump to that part of the video. To add time links you’ll first need to scrub through your video and note the minutes and seconds when new topics or new sections begin. Any numbers entered into the video’s description with the format hours:minutes:seconds will automatically be turned into hyperlinks for your viewers. For instance, if you include 00:03:55 anywhere in the description, YouTube will make it a link that jumps to 3 minutes and 55 seconds into your video. This is great for when students review a teacher’s video. They can skip to the part they want to see again. I include time links in the videos I create for my online professional learning classes so that adult learners can jump to the parts that are relevant to them.
You can include time links anywhere in the description. They can be entered one per line or mentioned anywhere in a paragraph. They can be at the beginning, the middle, and/or the end of your description. As long as you the time is in the format hours:minutes:seconds, YouTube will turn it into a hyperlink.
You can leave off the hours and use just minutes and seconds. For example, 12:30 would be hyperlinked to the 12 minutes, 30 seconds point in the video.
Time links are detected and made hyperlinks in YouTube comments too. For example, if you write the comment, “What just happened at 03:45?”, YouTube will hyperlink 03:45 to 3 minutes and 45 seconds into the video.
You can always go back and add time codes to videos you have already uploaded. Go to your YouTube Video Manager, locate the video, and click Edit. Click inside the description area and enter the time information.
There are several reasons why you may want to blur faces in your video. Perhaps you don’t have permission, perhaps a stranger entered a shot, or perhaps your video features a mystery person. Here’s how to blur faces: After your video is uploaded to YouTube, click the Edit Video button. Then click the Editor tab, and then click Add Blur. After clicking Edit next to Blur Faces, YouTube will begin the process of finding faces in your video. It can take quite a while to process, and it’s ok if you leave YouTube and return later. After processing, you’ll see thumbnails for each of the faces that YouTube detected. Click the thumbnail(s) of the faces you’d like to blur. You can play the preview to see frosted circles placed over the selected face(s). YouTube uses motion tracking, so the blur moves with the face. You can save the changes in the existing video or save as a new video.
Blur Faces uses Google’s artificial intelligence to find and track faces. There’s also Custom Blurring. Under the Custom Blurring tab, you can click and drag a box over whatever you want to blur. YouTube will automatically blur the object as it moves. Custom Blur is particularly handy for blurring logos, names, and addresses.
One way for teachers to get students to pay attention to a video is to let them know you’ll be asking them to retell different parts of the video. After viewing the video (together or separately), display the video so the class can see it. With the video paused, press a number key. Invite students to retell what is happening at that point in the video. You can type “random number between 1 and 9” into a Google search and use that number to jump to a spot in the video.