We were surprised when teachers started coming up to us at conferences saying that while they liked the fact that we had indexed all these “free to use” video resources, it did them no good. YouTube was blocked by their school’s Internet firewall.
Schools will block sites like YouTube to prevent viewing of “questionable” content or, more likely, to prevent YouTube viewing from overloading the school’s Internet connection.
Another issue is while the videos themselves may be OK for students, the ads YouTube includes are sometimes not “appropriate”.
Finally, with instruction moving online with Zoom, etc. it can be better to play back a video locally rather than running into limited bandwidth.
In cases like this, a teacher’s only option is to download the video somewhere with an accessible Internet connection and bring the video file into “school” on a laptop, USB thumb drive or via email (if it’s a short video).
This resource page looks at some of the options and issues surrounding videos from YouTube.