Visit http://edtechmoment.com for more classroom technology tutorials like this one
Like edtechmoment and TedEd, there are many sources of highly useful instructional and educational videos on YouTube. But unfortunately many school districts choose to block YouTube in an effort to provide students with a safer Internet experience. Today we will talk about how you can use HTTPS technology to access YouTube when your school is using a third party Internet filtering service.

In summary HTTPS stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure… in practice this means that when we are using an HTTPS connection outside observers on the network are not able to eavesdrop on internet traffic. What this means for us is that if your school uses a third party filtering service to block YouTube, then adding the S in "https://youtube.com" will not allow the filtering service to see your traffic, and by extension not be able to filter it.

You can also use this idea when you are building your class website and want to be able to embed YouTube videos to be usable at school. When you are copying and pasting the youtube embed code into your site, just be sure to add the letter S after the http and the video will not be filtered by a third party filtering service.

Enjoy using YouTube in your classroom to bring rich media content to your students. Less