Making YouTube Safe and Productive for Students

YouTube has grown and developed into a key learning tool for teachers of every grade across K-12. In many ways, YouTube has become an essential edtech app—in the 2024 EdTech App Report, it was the number one accessed app outside of the Google and Microsoft workplaces. However, because it is not a dedicated educational platform, it’s vitally important to ensure YouTube is both safe and productive for students.

The challenge for school district IT teams is to unleash the power of the educational content on YouTube while blocking content that is either inappropriate or potentially harmful. Historically, that has been an incredibly time-consuming effort.

Not with Lightspeed Filter™!

Lightspeed SmartPlay™, an integrated feature within Lightspeed Filter, makes it easy to keep YouTube content safe for schools, with settings designed specifically for K-12 education.

Promote Safe YouTube Access for Learning

Below, are seven advantages to Lightspeed Filter with SmartPlay, unmatched by others.

1. Lightspeed Filter with SmartPlay has a machine-learning AI database that grows bigger each day. Lightspeed Filter’s AI categorization feature has crawled nearly 200 million YouTube videos to ensure only educational content is available when Lightspeed SmartPlay is on. Rest assured your school district’s web content filter is keeping your students safe and on-task.
2. Lightspeed Filter with SmartPlay allows and blocks embedded video content across the web. No matter where your students are online, they’ll find only appropriate content.
3. Lightspeed Filter with SmartPlay lets you customize video streaming access on a granular level. IT departments can create custom blocked and allowed channels or videos. Lightspeed maintains your control to allow appropriate video and channel access while automating most of the manual work.
4. Lightspeed Filter with SmartPlay offers detailed reporting. SmartPlay features customizable reporting for YouTube traffic, so you get the most detailed user activity data possible.
5. Lightspeed Filter with SmartPlay allows IT administrators to vary access for student groups. We do not promote a “one-size-fits-all” policy in edtech, thus we allow for flexibility within Lightspeed Filter.
6. Lightspeed Filter with SmartPlay allows IT administrators to adjust viewing policies for after-school use. With the After School Rules setting, it’s quick and easy to free up access after the school day has been completed.
7. Lightspeed Filter with SmartPlay allows students to go directly to video-streaming sites for safe content. Embedding safe videos in your learning management system is a nice idea, but a lot of schools want users to be able to follow their natural behavior to view videos — like going directly to YouTube.com or the YouTube app — so students can learn search and research skills. Lightspeed Filter with SmartPlay makes this possible. When users visit YouTube.com, allowed videos will be accessible and inappropriate ones will be blocked, thumbnails and all.

To learn more about Lightspeed Filter with SmartPlay, request a demo today!