(9) YouTube in the Classroom... An Friendly Ally or A Potential Foe?

I stumbled upon this article about the addition of YouTube into classrooms.  All teachers can recognize that instruction for students must engage them in more than one way in order for them to adequately absorb content and be able to reflect it in other content areas that they know or may be studying.  While many of my classmates have incorporated articles of how YouTube has now chosen to include a more selective educational channel/aspect to it's site for teachers and students, there still remains a crucial question about it's integration.  Though learning will most likely benefit from it's adaptation, how will schools respond to the constraints it's integration will have to overcome?  Schools will likely have to cross over their own policies on internet and social media allowances to overcome the introduction of it's new educational assistant.  It is known that students can learn immensely from sources on the internet but they can also be immensely distracted by all that the world wide web has to potentially offer?

Will schools be able to make such a transition without having to overhaul and redefine their policies on students allowance onto certain internet sites as well as social media sites like YouTube?  I can see the immense relevance and importance in trying to convey a lesson to students and then having an educational video or snippet to assist them toward better comprehension of what they are learning.  Though YouTube can be an enriching site to aid in instruction for students, it is also where among the educational materials there are various quirky and potentially unsuitable materials for certain age groups.  As teachers, how do we censor the entire world wide web while still trying to get the lesson across our students' desks?

         In a short glance over the Educational Channel on YouTube, I found that it does have very much to offer in a classroom to virtually many different subject areas such as Art, Foreign Languages, History, Math, Science, and Language Arts.  Media can vary from subject to subject as well as grade level.  I posted an example below of how simple the English Parts of Speech such as Pronouns can be learned in a new and interesting approach.   The major problem with the channel is that is has no filters separating it from other content where other detrimental things can be seen and accessed by students.  For example, when examining English Subject Videos, one can easily search for music by a favorite artist which is a virtual gateway into much more than anyone can control.  How will schools integrate this while also protecting certain content from being seen by students? Can we have really have YouTube educationally without all its other strings attached?

What are your thoughts/comments? Let me know what do you think?