Those of you who check my blog on a regular basis have probably noticed I haven’t posted for a couple of weeks.  Conferences and other professional development opportunities seemed to congregate within a two week period in April.  Well now I’m back to begin sharing some of the things I’ve learned over the last couple of weeks.

The most recent conference I attended was the Nebraska Educational Technology Association (NETA) conference.  This is a premier conference attended by over 2000 Nebraska educators each year.  The NETA folks pulled off another great conference this year.

As many of you know, there is a lot of trash on YouTube, but there are also a lot of great resources for school.  YouTube is blocked in many of our schools, but what if you are searching YouTube from home and find a great video you want to use in your classroom.  At NETA I learned one method of saving a video to your computer or to a flash drive so that you can then show it in school.  Here are the steps:

1

You are searching YouTube and you come to a great video you’d like to download and save.  The URL might look something like what you see below:

2

Type the word kick between the www. and the word youtube and press Enter on your keyboard.  This will take you to the site KickYouTube where you will be able to start the process of downloading the video you just found.

3

At KickYouTube you will need to select a file format to save your video.  MP4 works with Quicktime players, FLV works with Adobe Flash Player or Real Player, AVI and MPG both work with Quicktime and Windows Media Player.  3GP works with Quicktime and Real Player.  If you’re not sure which format to choose, just experiment.  If one doesn’t work, delete the file and try a different format.

4

Next, click on the green Go button.

5

Next you will see a blue Down button.  This stands for download.  You will need to right click on the blue Down. You will get a drop down menu.  Choose “Save Link As” and then navigate to the place on your computer where you would like to save this file.

6

Now you can navigate to where you saved the file, open it and play it on whatever player you have installed on your computer.  If you saved it to a USB flash drive, you can take the file to school and play it on a computer there.  I hope this helps a few of you resolve your YouTube issues.