Walk into any school and try and log onto one of the computers. You will notice something: blocked websites. Blocked sites are ubiquitous on school computers around the world and for good reason. Literally anything you can imagine can be found on the internet and not all of those things are appropriate for schools. But there is one site that it is time to loosen the reigns on: YouTube.

Most schools block YouTube on their technological devices. I have a classroom full of Chromebooks but none of them can access YouTube. My school has decided this is not a site they should have access to. This isn’t just a criticism of my school; most schools have made this decision.

This does not work for 2023.

First of all, YouTube has significant educational value. There are a significant number of channels that specialize in educational content. I can get around the blocks on my computer and the videos I show are usually from YouTube. It would be substantially more convenient if students were able to access this content. Ed-Tech has figured this out, and that is the reason that many online learning platforms like Nearpod, allow you to embed videos from the site into lessons, a function that doesn’t work if the school blocked the site.

Some people will point out how not everything on YouTube is appropriate for school and that it can become distracting for kids. That is correct. But unlike the rest of the internet, YouTube is a manageable ecosystem with all kinds of educator and parental controls. It is entirely possible to manage exactly what students have access to especially on a Chromebook.

YouTube can be distracting, and it does contain material that kids shouldn’t have access to but here is an overlooked detail: They have access to it anyway. Seriously, they do. No matter how advanced your web filter is, they will always find or even create a work around site that gives them indirect access to YouTube. It takes longer and of course you can block those sites too. However, you can’t block them fast enough, and it really is not worth trying.

The only way to truly stop students from accessing YouTube is to forgo the filter route and literally only allow specific websites…and if you have the ability to do that then you also have the ability to only allow certain videos.

Additionally, when you think about where the world is going, does it really make sense to block a site like YouTube? This isn’t 2005. The site is no longer a novelty. Many of our students may have careers based directly or indirectly on YouTube. Blocking YouTube in 2023 is the equivalent of blocking school computers from accessing the internet in 1998. The internet was new and cool in the late 90s but not yet objectively necessary to deliver content. Still students who went to schools that were forward thinking and didn’t deprive their students of those opportunities probably benefited in the long run as the internet became essential to almost everything.

My class does a video editing unit. When I started doing it in 2011, it was a cool niche thing that seemed like an extra-curricular. Now, many people are significantly more likely to watch a video than they are to read an article. Do the forward thinking thing: Let the students get on YouTube.