Walpole Public Schools

Hi, I’m your student! Mr. Reeve asked me to write this tip for you today, and I’ll make it short and sweet.

I love when you show a relevant YouTube video in class. As a post-millennial, my primary source of entertainment is YouTube, and I am very comfortable with 5- to 10-minute long videos to add variety to a lesson. It breaks up the flow of the class, and lets me both process what we’re learning and think about the content in another way. Good job!

A video about the Life and Times of John Quincy Adams? Let’s DO this!

But can I tell you a YouTube hint that most of my teachers don’t know about? Turning off AutoPlay.

You see, YouTube makes money from ads, so they love it when I sit at home, turn on YouTube, and let it jump from one video to the next without pushing any buttons. For you older generation, it’s like leaving the TV tuned to one channel (with, like, a dial or rabbit ears or something? I don’t really know, we don’t watch TV).

Really, how did you people live like this?

But this continuous flow of videos doesn’t make sense in class.

Here’s what happens in class if you don’t turn off AutoPlay:

1. You show a cool video and it ends.
2. You start talking, but all we see is the “Play next video” timer counting down.
3. Here’s where we as student split into two groups:
   1. Half of us get stressed that the video is about to start and you don’t know. We don’t want to interrupt you, but we see disaster coming. It breaks us from our train of thought and we don’t learn as well, so we’ll fail tomorrow’s quiz, the class, and never get into college. (Some of us are Olympic-quality stress cases).
      
      
      
      
      
      AutoPlay is starting! I’ll never get into John Hopkins medical school now!
   2. The other half think it’s hilarious to watch you trying to figure out where the sound is coming from when the next video starts.

Since I’m in the first group, I wanted to cut down on your stress (and mine) with this tip: please turn off AutoPlay.

Here's how to turn off AutoPlay

1. Start a video.
2. While the video is playing, look at the icons near Closed Captions, Settings, etc.
3. If there’s an AutoPlay button, turn it off.

The good news is, once you click this off, it stays off forever. If you can turn it off, please do!

I’m tempted to also write about the stress we feel when we see the mouse cursor in the middle of a playing video, too (usually because you didn’t move the cursor off of the “play” button), but I’ll save that one for another tip, if Mr. Reeve asks me back.

Happy YouTubing!