Engage your students with a YouTube playlist

image courtesy of Literary Fusions

YouTube has a ton of great videos that can be used in the classroom. Videos can be used to spark discussion, model a concept, hook students, provide real world context, or make lessons more engaging for visual learners. Finding and bookmarking all those great individual videos can be time consuming. Luckily, YouTube has an easy way of curating all those videos into one location.

Playlists are groups of videos curated by you. They provide a convenient way to create groups of videos that you want to refer to during a lesson. You can even share those playlists with students as a resource for them as well.

In order to create playlists you must first be logged in to your YouTube account, which is the same as your Google account.

Playlists can be created two ways. The first way is right from your YouTube home screen. Click on the Playlists tab and then click the New Playlist button. Enter a name for your playlist and set it to Public.

 

When you find a video that you want to keep, click the + button and add it to a playlist. You can also create a new playlist right from this screen.

Finding playlists

Other teachers may have already created playlists full of great content. You can find public playlists searching right in YouTube. In the search bar enter in any topic you are looking for. In the search results click the Filter drop down menu and select Playlists. This will show you only playlists with that search term in the name.

Instead of clicking the drop down and selecting a filter, you can include that filter right in your search by typing a comma and the filter, as shown here. The results also show you how many videos are in that playlist.

 

 

You can view individual videos and add them to your own playlists. You may even like the entire playlist and trust the author to curate quality videos. When viewing the playlist just click the +Save button and that playlist will be added to your Playlists in your guide on the left hand side. Every time the author adds another video, you'll automatically see it in your saved playlists.

Videos are a great tool to engage students in content. What are some ways you use video in your classroom?