Over the last few weeks, teachers and pupils alike have experienced difficulties searching online for videos on Youtube and images from Google images. This wasn’t expected, as we are currently on Level 4 of the Content Filtering whereby access to Youtube is allowed. It is quite understandable, that in the case of teachers who have been accustomed to sourcing educational video clips from sites such as Youtube etc. for their teaching that they would have a difficulty understanding why they couldn’t suddenly access Youtube videos that could be accessed last week, month or year. Similarly. our pupils at the senior end of the school, are quite familiar with sourcing images for school related project work from Google images and they too were surprised when they received a message from the Brightcloud Content Filter that their search was blocked. So it came as no surprise to the ICT Coordinator and myself when teachers and pupils came calling for assistance. I am not exactly sure whether the problem was due to some changes in the content filtering in recent times or due to recent changes to Googgle’s search algorithm. However the solution to both, is very simple, turning on the safe search option for both Youtube and Google.
Turning on Youtube’s Safety Mode, visit any Youtube page and scroll down to the bottom of the page. Click on the Safety Off button to bring up the Safety Menu. Click on the On radio button and Click on Save. Once you have set Safety Mode on, you should receive a confirmation message – successfully enabled safety mode as per screenshots below.
Turning on Google’s Safe Search – visit Google’s homepage www.google.ie. Click on Settings at the bottom of the screen. Next click on Search setting from the pop up menu. On the next screen, click on Filter explicit results to filter out explicit content from your searches. Finally click on Save to save your settings.
You can find further information on Youtube Safety Mode here and on Google Safe Search here.