Accessing online educational videos in low-bandwidth school settings

For teachers in low bandwidth school settings - schools with slow or no internet connections - streaming online videos in class is not an option available to them. There are many useful, educational videos such as Khan Academy, which teachers would love to show their students but it is just not possible in their school setting.

One solution to this situation is for teachers to download and save videos using high bandwidth connections like ones they may have at home. They can save videos to their laptops or portable drives and take them to school to show to their students.

The easiest way to download and save online videos from websites like YouTube is by using the Firefox browser with a video downloader add-on.

If you already have Firefox installed and it is your default browser, great! If not, you will need to download and install Firefox, and make it your default browser. It is free and available online by going to the Mozilla website. Once you have downloaded and installed Firefox, open a browser window. At the top of the window, click on add-ons.

Once the ‘add-ons’ tab opens, type ‘video download helper into the search box and click ‘enter’ on your keyboard.  The list of video download add-ons will be there. Double click on ‘Video download helper’ to download and install the add-on.

Once you 'refresh' your browser, an icon will be visible in the upper right-hand corner of your browser window. When you are on a web page with a video, this icon will be colored like the image below. Click on it.

When you click on the icon, Information on the available video will visible. Click on the download arrow as shown below and the video on your current page will be downloaded and saved. This will allow you to download educational videos from websites like YouTube.

The icon will be greyed out when there are no videos on the current web page.

Caution: Do not download copyrighted materials or materials where the creator expressly forbids download. This information is only to allow you to download educational videos for use with your students in school situations where they would not otherwise have the opportunity to learn with educational videos.

Next: Ways to use videos in your lesson