The capabilities and convenience of technology is growing every day, and more and more things are going digital. This now includes education.
With distance learning becoming more popular, especially since the pandemic, YouTube has expanded its educational content into a whole new educational section of YouTube. This is allowing YouTube to become part of the movement toward distance learning.
There have been educational content creators on YouTube for many years, and some of the best ones have been around since 2006. But the educational side of YouTube took off relatively recently, and now everyone is asking “Is YouTube beneficial for education?”.
Some Benefits Of YouTube
YouTube definitely has some excellent advantages for education, such as:
- Easy to incorporate
- Encourages online discussions
- Easy to access
Easy To Incorporate
YouTube is an intuitive, user-friendly platform with parental settings that can allow parents and teachers to restrict the viewing abilities of students and children. This makes it easy to incorporate into the classroom without the danger of coming across inappropriate content.
Encourages Online Discussions
As an online platform with the ability to comment on videos, this encourages learners to engage with the content and discuss it with others online. Whether through the YouTube comments section, in Google Classroom, or in online study groups, online discussions help learners to better understand the concepts being taught.
This is done through the engagement of the students themselves. As a media platform, students likely already engage with YouTube, so finding educational content that is interesting can help them be focused and enthusiastic about their learning.
Easy To Access
All you need is a device with an internet connection and either data or Wi-Fi. You can access YouTube on your cellphone, which means you can access it wherever you are, as long as you have data.
You can also access it on larger portable devices, such as tablets and laptops, which means that even if you do not have a desktop computer, you can still access YouTube.
How Can YouTube Help Students?
YouTube can help in many ways. Studies have shown that we learn better from videos than from just talking. We learn better when interacting with the learning material, and we learn our best when teaching the material.
YouTube is a unique platform that allows visual learning as well as interactive discussions of the content. This is especially helpful for students who learn visually.
For kinaesthetic learners (students who learn by doing), YouTube creates the springboard for them to create their own content.
YouTube is a helpful and inclusive platform for many students who learn differently, and who may struggle with classroom settings.
YouTube is also a social media platform associated with watching movies and videos with friends. This creates an element of fun for students, which helps them to engage better with the learning material in general.
Is YouTube A Good Educational Tool?
Yes, YouTube can be a very good educational tool. There are catchy lessons, such as songs containing the names of all the bones in the human body. This is helpful for learners studying biology. This is only one of many examples of fun content that helps with education.
Does Video Improve Learning?
Yes, it can help the learning process to watch videos. Most students learn better when they see something rather than just hearing it. This means that just watching the video helps the students to learn better, with the added benefit of being to interact with others about it afterwards.
To find out more about the benefits and possibilities of distance learning, you can contact one of the course experts at Skills Academy:
- Call us for free on 0800 39 00 27
- Or fill out a contact form for a callback
What Have We Learned?
- There are many educational benefits to using YouTube in the classroom
- YouTube is easy to incorporate into the classroom
- YouTube creates an engaging online platform for learners
- YouTube can be particularly helpful for students with different learning styles
- Videos do improve learning
Join Skills Academy and study through distance learning. Upskill yourself and use YouTube to help you along the way. Register with us today!
Author: Chloe Bydawell
Editor: Razeen Dollie
Date: June 29, 2022