Tutorial: Using Videos from YouTube

Sites like YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/) can be a really rich source of authentic video and audio. Many of the videos are great for the ELT classroom because they are quite short, so they don’t take too long to download and there is a vast collection all for free.

Sending students, particularly younger ones to a site like this can be very risky though. Even if you send them directly to the page with the video you want them to watch, you never know what other links are likely to be on the page and what kinds of unsuitable things they might take your students to. This quick tutorial shows you way to get around this problem

The Tutorial

• It shows you how to use a simple template and 'Wordpad' to create a simple web page that you can embed the video into.
• This doesn’t mean that you need to have your own website or web skills. You can store the web page on your hard drive. The video will still work as long as your computer has a live connection to the Internet.

You can see an example from here by just clicking on this link:

• Tony vs Paul

• This is a funny short video that I thought would be really useful for describing prepositions of movement, or even a little bit of daily routine. Or simply just describing what you see happening. Students could either write a brief description of a short segment or take it in turns to describe to each other orally.

To see how the simple worksheet is created, just watch this Flash movie tutorial:

• Launch Flash tutorial (890Kb)

To try creating this yourself, you can download these step by step instructions:

• Instructions (447Kb pdf)

You’ll also need to download the html template, just right click the link below and click on ‘Save target as’ and save the template to your computer's desktop:

• template.htm