YouTube is a great tool for learning in and out of school. Students and teachers learn from YouTube on a daily basis. There are a couple of tricks that can help your viewers to be more engaged in the content of the video and this post will outline them.

This is kind of a no-brainer, but I need to say it. Most people today do not have time to sit down and watch a video that is above 5 minutes. They will lose interest and get side tracked on something more interesting. I try to keep videos between 2-3 minutes long. To cut your videos down, I recommend you use TubeChop.

Your LMS (Schoology, Edmodo, Google Classroom) is designed to be a digital learning space. Get your parents, teachers, and especially students in the habit of going to this space for content and classroom information. Post a link to your classroom page in your email signature and constantly link material back to it when questions arise. Embedding videos into an LMS often removes the ads and distracting content which aids in the engagement of the content.

If you did not already know, you can embed a YouTube video directly into a Google Form. This will remove the distracting content and ads providing a safe view for kiddos. You can also add follow up questions from the video to check content absorption along with overall engagement. 

This is a website that allows you to connect a video, with questions or discussions. Find your video, then begin to add the content. All content is time stamped which allows the viewer to click on a question or discussion and be navigated back to the section in the video. Ask your viewers' questions or pose interesting topics for rich, content oriented discussions. Go to Vialogues to find more information.

This is a Google Drive add on, which makes sharing, and syncing a process that you are familiar with. Create notes for videos and share them with students. These notes are time stamped allowing the user to find information quickly in a longer video. Share your notes with your students through Google Drive just like you do with any other document. Go to Videonot.es to find more information.