Wednesday, December 9, 2009

How to Download a YouTube Video

Every semester, we get questions from faculty regarding the use of YouTube videos in their classes. Faculty, whether they're teaching online or face-to-face, have become accustomed to integrating YouTube video in their instruction. Most often, faculty use the video to highlight or illustrate a particular point or to seed a discussion or point of instruction. Faculty have gotten fairly adroit at grabbing the embed code from YouTube and embedding a video in their online course or faculty web page. Likewise they have very little difficulty grabbing the link and sharing it with students, either online or in a PowerPoint presentation.

The issue that we're asked about most frequently is "How do I download a YouTube video?" The reason faculty may want to download the videos are many and varied. Most often cited are a lack of or slow Internet connection where they'll be using the video, or a fear that content on YouTube may disappear from semester to semester. There are many techniques for downloading content from YouTube. Some are fairly cumbersome and require multiple steps. The technique we illustrate in the video below is one of the simplest we've been able to find. The key to this approach is the use of a bookmarklet (bookmark + applet), which looks no different than the bookmarks we've all been using for years, but provides a lot more functionality than a vanilla bookmark.

You can grab the bookmarklet and read the instructions for yourself at the Google Operating System blog. So without further delay, here's the video - once you've mastered this technique, feel free to download our video;)


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