YouTube Playlists & Google Translate

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This week I've learned so much about YouTube and how it can be used as a beneficial tool in the classroom. While some may be skeptical about the content of YouTube and worry about the safety of accessing certain videos, there is a lot of appropriate, educational learning content available on the internet that can enhance student connections. (Did you know there's even an Education extension of YouTube that filters out all those questionable sources?) When you're making plans for the upcoming week or month, you can use YouTube to create and save playlists of videos you'd like to use so they'll all be in one place when you're ready to access them. Here's a playlist I created for my preschool students to go with our new Buildings study. Additionally, you can add other users as contributors, so your co-teachers can also access your playlists, and in the instance you want to use part of a video that is too long, you can customize the start point of a video. When you click to Share a video, under the shareable link it gives you the option to choose where you want the video to begin. Pretty neat, huh?


One of my favorite new resources regarding YouTube was this website, SafeShare, that allows you to copy and paste the URL for a video on it's website, and it automatically removes all adds and recommended videos for clean viewing with no distractions.

I explored a few other Google tools this week, like Google Street View that allows you to see almost anywhere in the world from street level and Google Scholar that helps you search for educational journals and resources, but my favorite tool (and the most relevant for my current teaching position) is Google Translate. Google Translate gives users the opportunity to translate between English and over 100 other languages, which is amazing if you have English Language Learners in your classroom. The mobile app allows you to translate in a variety of ways -- typing text, speaking directly into the microphone (or your cell phone), or even writing it directly onto your tablet or phone using a stylus. I created a basic How-To introduction to Google Translate here. Not only can Google Translate be used to communicate with students in your classroom on a daily basis, but it can also be used to translate important documents and can be utilized during communication with families, most prominently Parent/Teacher Conferences when a human translator is not available.



I hope that you will find these tools as helpful as I have in my classroom. Stay tuned for new tips and tricks next week!

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About Me

My name is Megan, I live in Overland Park, KS, and I'm a Head Start early childhood teacher. I love music, art, and I'm a little bit stuck in the 90's. This is a blog about useful Google features & technology tools that can be applied to any classroom setting. Teach on!

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