YouTube for Schools to Cease

Information for Teaching Staff

YouTube for Schools (YTFS) offered educational settings a clever way to access the valuable video that is available on YouTube without exposing students to content that was inappropriate. An administrator signed up for a YouTube for Schools account/channel and added YouTube videos that teachers wanted students to be able to access in school to the account. E2BN Protex utilised YTFS on all student profiles by adding educational content to the E2BN YTFS account/channel and redirecting YouTube request to YTFS.

On 1st July Google is will cease the YTFS service. All schools need to be aware that from 1st July the type of content that students might be able to access on YouTube will change. Students may be able to access content that would previously have been inaccessible.

If your school uses E2BN Protex Filtering… Protex will force Google Restricted Mode on YouTube for all student profiles saving your technician a lot of time. But please remember, Google’s Restricted Mode is not as safe as using YTFS. Google’s Restricted Mode is not 100% accurate. Google uses “community flagging, age restrictions and other signals to identify and filter out content” that Google believes to be inappropriate. Potentially, there is a lot of content on YouTube that you would not want your students to see that will get past Restricted Mode. Restricted Mode is available in all languages, but the quality and cultural sensitivities vary at different levels.

If your school uses a different Filter… If your school uses a different filter you should contact your provider to see if they force ‘Restricted Mode’. If your filter provider does not force Restricted Mode for students someone may need to enable it on every device. If your browser supports multiple user profiles, it will need to be enabled for each profile.

And finally… E2BN believes that Google’s cessation of YTFS offers a very real risk to student safeguarding and places an additional burden on the technical staff who may need to manage the YouTube settings on every device. YouTube-release-v4

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