Educators Rejoice! YouTube Permits Moderated Video Comments By Default

Educators rejoice! This is a great piece of news. I’ve waited a couple of years for Google to make this available as a YouTube channel setting.

cc licensed ( BY ) flickr photo shared by Jonny Hunter

YouTube has tremendous value to classroom teachers as a free video hosting platform. In the past, when posting a video to YouTube, users had to manually turn comment moderation ON. YouTube added batch processing for video settings, so comment moderation could be turned on simultaneously for multiple videos, but the process was not automatic. There was not a “comment moderation on by default” setting.

Today, thanks to this updated “Comment moderation” help page from YouTube, I learned default comment moderation for new videos CAN be enabled! After logging into your Gmail account, point your browser to www.youtube.com/comment_management and choose “Hold All Comments for Review” on new videos as the default setting at the bottom of the page.

In the past, users would receive a notification message in their YouTube “inbox” when a new YouTube comment needed to be reviewed / approved.

Now, however, to receive a notification you need to enable either email and/or SMS notifications in your Google+ profile.

These changes are superb and welcome! I’ve wanted default comment moderation for YouTube videos as long as I’ve been publishing to YouTube. This is something I’ll be adding to our day 2 curriculum on “Quick Edit Videography” for iPad Media Camp! As an educator, the last thing you want when you share student work online is to have someone post offensive or inappropriate comments on it. For this reason, comment moderation is extremely important and needed on social media sites where student work is shared.

I recommend as an educator, you enable comment moderation BY DEFAULT on your professional YouTube channel. You will need to make this change to your account manually, however, as the default setting for all users is to have comments automatically accepted / shared without moderation.

I have helped several different organizations setup YouTube channels in the past two years, but the two channels I use professionally now are my personal channel, with over 450 videos and over half a million cumulative views (www.youtube.com/wfryer) and my school channel, where I’ve just posted 22 videos so far (www.youtube.com/coachfryer).

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