The new program enables schools to offer limited access to the site

Dec 12, 2011 13:16 GMT  ·  By

YouTube is making the lives of many students around the world easier. Plenty of courses would be unbearable without YouTube to pass the time. At least, at the schools that haven't blocked access to the site yet.

But there's stuff on YouTube that could actually be educational, quite a lot of it in fact. Unfortunately, for schools and teachers, it's an all or nothing proposition.

They either allow access to YouTube, with everything that's in there, or they block the site entirely, along with the educational videos.

However, YouTube is now proposing a middle ground. YouTube for Schools only allows access to vetted educational videos from YouTube EDU.

"We’ve developed YouTube for Schools, a network setting that school administrators can turn on to grant access only to the educational content from YouTube EDU," YouTube explained.

"Teachers can choose from the hundreds of thousands of videos on YouTube EDU created by more than 600 partners like the Smithsonian, TED, Steve Spangler Science, and Numberphile," it said.

Schools interested in the program can sign up to be included, but there's one catch, they need to use a Google Apps account. After that, setting it up isn't overly complicated.

"We know how busy teachers are, and that searching through thousands of videos sounds like a daunting visit to the world’s largest library, so we’ve also worked with teachers to put together more than 300 playlists broken out by subject -- Math, Science, Social Studies, and English Language Arts -- and by grade level," YouTube added.

There's content from 600 YouTube EDU partners available from the get go. However, teachers can create their own playlists of video that can be made available to students via YouTube for Schools.

This ensures that the videos the school or teachers upload are accessible as well as anything else on YouTube that may be useful.