Video Tutorial : Creating A YouTube Playlist

YouTube is an incredibly powerful tool for teachers to both create and curate videos for the benefit of their students.  It is amazing to think that by creating a free YouTube channel with your Google account you can reach a global audience.

I recently offered several workshops to teachers on using YouTube in the classroom and was really hit by the following two statistics that really demonstrate why we as teachers should be considering how we could use YouTube to reach our students:

Creating a playlist is a great way for teachers to help organize the huge amount of content on YouTube for your students (and yourself).  I would never ask one of my students to physically go into the largest library in the world and "find a book on the Civil War" so I would never ask them to do the same on YouTube.  

I have already created a YouTube playlist for every unit that I teach in 8th grade U.S. History. Having a playlist, which is basically a folder, already created means that when I do stumble upon a great content video on YouTube it is just one click away from being saved in my playlist for when I want it later.  I recently stumbled upon a great video about the Jefferson's gardens at Monticello so I quickly added it to my "Monticello" playlist so I can find it later when I teach that unit next.

In preparation for a recent workshop I recorded some video tutorials to help teach some of the editing and curation tools available in YouTube. I want to share the first one - Creating a Playlist in YouTube - in this blog post.  Over the week I will post different tutorials each day or you can jump ahead and view them all at once in a playlist with all ten tutorials.