Bypass the YouTube Block

November 29, 2008 by Theresa McGee 

If you are like me, you may have had the following situation happen to you.

I was at home researching how to teach about the “Blue Dog” by George Rodrigue and found the PERFECT YouTube video to introduce his work (an excerpt from CBS Sunday Morning). Excited and ready to share with my students, I typed in the YouTube address at school and got the dreaded school filter message: “Access Denied”.   My great introduction to “Blue Dog” was blocked and my lesson plan quickly changed.

Not too long ago, I came across a blog post from Free Technology for Teachers that solved my problem. I experimented with a few YouTube converter sites (ConvertMyTube, Media Converter, and Vixy) that take the video you need and download it to your computer.  Since I was blocked at school, I started by accessing the YouTube video I wanted to download from home.  I copied the URL address (ex. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp_UhYOhulA) and pasted it into a converter site.  I like ConvertMyTube best of the three for its simplicity. Once my George Rodrigue video converted and downloaded to my computer, I just emailed it to myself at school.  Problem solved.


Here is the George Rodigue YouTube video I used with my students. Go to YouTube and try converting one yourself using one of the converter sites listed above!
Know of a YouTube video that would be great for teaching students? Add it in a comment below!

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Comments

3 Responses to “Bypass the YouTube Block”

  1. Richard Byrne on December 2nd, 2008 1:07 am

    I’m glad that my blog post helped you out.
    Your blog is great. I’m not an art teacher, but I’ve enjoyed exploring it.

  2. Ludmilla on December 11th, 2008 1:37 am

    Theresa,

    It is an interesting post and the tools seem to be helpful. I have another suggestion. if you use Firefox, it has a plug in/add on program called Edhelper (you can download it from Mazilla Firefox). Each time you find a video you want to use for your classes, hit the icon and the video will be downloaded to your computer with a click of a button.

    Ludmilla

  3. Jacob Lawrence Story & Sound : The Teaching Palette on November 27th, 2009 7:40 pm

    [...] viewing the YouTube video above? Bypass the YouTube Block could [...]

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