Thursday, August 23, 2012

Commercials Invade Music Appreciation Classes!

To people who use YouTube videos to enhance their Music Appreciation classes, WATCH OUT!

I try to make it as easy as possible for students to listen to the music we talk about in class, and, until this semester, I found it easy use YouTube video links to recordings (many that I own) to help my students learn. Obviously our friends at YouTube have figured out that they have a captive and targeted audience in the more serious and studios type of college student, the one that uses the resources his or her teachers point to on line.

This morning I was shocked to find various ads in front of a recording of Perotin (student-targeted ads: Justin Beiber singing "Happy Birthday," an ad for HP computers, and a PSA about not texting and driving). Since this type of thing seriously compromises the "flow" of class, I would suggest to anyone using YouTube in class to play segments of commercial recordings that people have put on YouTube (particularly of the Naxos variety), to load everything ahead of time and screen out (or click out, which you can only do after 5 seconds) the commercials, since the ads start playing right away.

6 comments:

MICHAEL MONROE said...

I hope I don't get zapped for saying this, but it can also be useful to use RealPlayer (free version) to download videos to your computer - this also helps me when, for whatever reason, the Internet isn't flowing well in my classroom. What I don't like about this is that I prefer to keep any YouTubes linked in PowerPoint as links so that students downloading the PowerPoints can easily access the same links. So I often end up having to re-do the links before posting a lecture.

M. Handler said...

Also, if you use Firefox or Chrome for your browser, there are extensions you can download to block the ads automatically...

Elaine Fine said...

Thank you both! Since I am unable to load anything onto the antiquated computer in my classroom, I'm going the USB route--uploading videos. I never realized how sheltered I have been by the ad-blocking extensions I have on my own computer! It's a jungle out there!

Michael Leddy said...

Ultimate YouTube Downloader is an extension for Chrome.

Carl said...

Wow, thanks for the info! I have installed AdBlocker, and it seems to work fine.

Elaine Fine said...

The Ultimate YouTube Downloader extension is no longer in the Chrome Web Store, and the one that they do have, FVD Video Downloader, comes with this lovely disclaimer:

"*** Due to Chrome Webstore Policy users are not able to download Youtube Video. This is NOT Youtube Downloader! ***