Before jumping to this week’s tip, I’ll remind you that 50 Tech Tuesday Tips is 20% off this week when you use this link.
Whether for sharing instructional videos or for sharing videos of school events, YouTube is the most convenient option for most of us. In fact, it’s so convenient that even teachers who have told me “I’ll never use YouTube” have eventually ended up using it to store their videos.
What is YouTube Studio?
YouTube Studio is the area within your YouTube account in which you can upload, store, publish, and edit your videos. YouTube Studio also provides you with analytical information about the viewership of your videos. That information includes for how long people watch your videos and how they find your videos.
Privacy Settings
Even if you don’t publish your videos on YouTube, you can still use it as a place to store your video files for free by simply marking them as private. Knowing how to control the privacy of your videos is one of a few YouTube Studio settings that you should know how to use. When you upload a video to your YouTube account you have the choice to mark it as public, private, or unlisted.
- Public: this option, obviously, makes your video visible to anyone on YouTube and beyond.
- Private: this option makes your video visible only to you and the people you invite to watch it via email (they’ll have to log into their Google accounts to view it). It’s worth noting that a video marked as private won’t work in third party tools like EDpuzzle.
- Unlisted: this option is a middle ground between public and private. Your video won’t appear in search results, but it is visible to anyone who has the link to your video. This is a good option for sharing your video into third party tools like EDpuzzle as it keeps the video from appearing in search results, but still allows it to work with those third party tools.
- Disable embedding: use this option if you want your video to appear publicly only on your YouTube channel and not anywhere else.
Comment Moderation
I’ve often said that reading the comments on YouTube videos is like reading graffiti on the walls of a public bathroom. Yes, you might find something interesting, but you’re more likely to read nonsense. It’s for that reason that I disable comments on all of the videos that I upload to YouTube. Another option is to enable comment moderation so that all comments are held for your review and approval before they appear under your videos.
Selectively Blur Faces and Objects
This is a great feature to utilize whenever you upload a video that has a face or object that you’d like to hide from viewers. In the video editor in your YouTube Studio account you can select “blur” to automatically or selectively blur faces and objects. The automatic blurring option blurs all faces in your video. The selective blurring option lets you pick which faces and objects to blur and set the length of time for which those faces and objects are blurred.
Watch this short video to learn how to use all of the features that I’ve outlined above.
Discounted On-demand Courses
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