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Yesterday I watched this amazing You Tube video of the winning performance on Ukraine’s Got Talent 2009—that’s right, Ukraine—and immediately thought of art teachers Steve Donald, Mary Tucker, and Randall Leach. I wondered how our art teachers might use the video with their students; however, the video IS on You Tube and, therefore, NOT accessible at school. Of course, if you are at school and clicked the link above, you already know that. Not only could they not show the video to their students, but I couldn’t even show it to them without sending them a link to watch at home. No fun.
The same has probably happened to many of you. You find some cute, clever, inspiring video to introduce a concept or add humor to your instruction, and, what do you know, you have no ability to show it to your students. Proxy programs get blocked. You Tube has no download feature. You’ve got nothing.
The answer is here—You Tube Downloader. (For those of you who already knew this, please don’t think I’m slow.)
Six Quick Steps
Step 1: go to http://youtubedownload.altervista.org/
Step 2: click the download now icon
 
Step 3: review the specs. The program appears to be Windows specific, so I’m not sure it will run on your Mac. If the specs match your computer, click the download icon
 
 Download Now
Step 4: click save, and choose to save the program to your desktop. Doing so will download a setup icon, which, once you double click it, should set up the You Tube Downloader program on your desktop.
Step 5: open You Tube Downloader.
Step 6: Copy and paste a You Tube url (obviously, you will need to be in a place where you can access You Tube at this point) where it says, “Enter Video url.†Duh.
It will take a few minutes, but once it’s finished, you should be able to view the video from your computer without any problems—no Internet required. You can also insert it in a Power Point presentation.
Trouble shooting
If you cannot play your converted You Tube video, don’t worry. Click the convert video button. Select a different format—probably Windows Media Player—and hit OK. You should be ready to rock. And if you aren’t, call me for help.
Even cooler—you can convert just a segment of the video instead of the whole thing, which means you could break up long videos into segments, or save only what you need.
But be careful
Video files take up a lot of space. If you are going to save more than a couple, do not save them to your system folder or the common folder. Your flash drive or a CD might be better choices for video storage.
Leave me a comment and let me know how it works.
Happy teaching.
Thanks, Mike. I shared this with the SCHS faculty and gave you the credit!!
I used this quite a bit in my classroom. One nice thing about this is that you can also imbed this file, or clips from a file into PowerPoint. Using clips is great because it allows you to insert questions on another slide at different points within the video.