Do you You Tube in the classroom?

Hey there friends!  How often do you use You Tube in your classroom?  Does your school district block You Tube?  Do you hate having to skip those annoying ads?

Well today I am going to share with you a way to download a You Tube video so that you can either save it to your computer or to a usb stick and then play it at school without any worries.
I wish I had known about this before the time I put a You Tube video up about the solar system and one of my darlings pointed out the swear word in the comments.  The walk of shame to the Principals office to inform her of my gaff was enough to turn me off You Tube forever, which would have been a real shame because there are so many great videos that support our teaching.

So let's get to it! This is super easy by the way.

First find the You Tube video that you want to download.  My class loves Storybots and we are looking at days of the week so I chose this vid

Then add an ss just after the www. and before the youtube bit in the address bar, just like in the pic below

 When you click enter it will take you to a screen that looks a bit like this.  Click on the green download button I always save it as an MP4 at 720p because I have been told that is the best quality.  You can save it at a lower quality if you need to save file space.  There will be a pop up box that says you can download a program that makes it easy to save videos but I just do it this way and I haven't had any issues.

That is pretty much it, you will see it downloading in the corner of your screen, then just save it to where you need it :) too easy right!

I hope this was helpful and that you will now never suffer the embarrassment of having to explain to your kids and Principal about swear words in the comments.

Learning Update

No I am not dead nor have I joined a cult that forbids the use of blogging as a way of communicating. I am just busy getting my butt kicked by a bunch of 5 year olds.

Seriously guys this year is HARD!  I am struggling to fit everything in and that includes blogging :( please forgive me!

On the other hand I have been super busy in the classroom and I wanted to share some of the things we have been doing while I have an hour to myself (yes I know I should be writing reports.....but I don't want to).

We have been all about trying out new technology in our classroom.  We are very lucky to have received and Osmo and some Touchtronics letters and numbers for our Prep room.  The kiddos love how interactive it is and it has now become a favourite hands on ipad activity.

We have been heavy on counting activities as well!  We have used lots of different objects to count below you can see our counting penguins which the kiddos love. 

  

counting penguins

Adding "river rocks" to help dinosaurs cross the river

Another favourite activity was laying river rocks across a river to help dinosuars cross to the other side.  The kiddos loved it so much I had to leave it out for over a week.  The kiddos rolled a dice and then laid the glass stones end to end, only one dinosaur could cross one bridge so they had to do it multiple times.  The aim was to get as many dinosaurs across as they could.

Threading washers

I also had some bolts, washers and nuts out in a tinkering tray, the kiddos had to thread the washers onto the bolts and then put a nut on to the end to secure it, they then had to pass it to a friend to check, have you noticed the fine motor practice I sneak in heehee.

Balloon Pop!

The last activity I wanted to share with you is a game I made called Balloon Pop to 10, this is great for counting forward to 10 and backwards from 10.  Just click here or on the pic for your free copy.



As you can see in this next pic, we love reading to our Book Buddies :) we do this multiple times during the week in different contexts.  These littles are reading their take home readers prior to them going home, we also use our book buddies during guided reading and free choice reading.

I hope to be back in a week to share some more fun learning from our classroom......who am I kidding, see you in a month haha. (unless I join a cult)