At the beginning of the school year in September, all Freshman and Sophomores received Dell Chromebooks purchased with money from a grant.

Until recently, though, students were not able to use YouTube or listen to music on their Chromebooks due to filtering software pre-installed on their devices. That has now changed, and students will be able to use YouTube and listen to music from certain sources such as Pandora and Soundcloud after 6:00 p.m. YouTube and music streaming services will still be blocked in school because the current network cannot handle many devices on streaming services.

Instructional technology resource teacher Diana Flick thinks that this will be beneficial for teachers and students.

“Educationally, YouTube has some great uses. The flipped classroom model is the buzz-phrase now in education. Teachers can assign videos to watch, but only after 6:00 and only if students have access,” Flick said.

The flipped classroom model is a relatively new educational model in which students prepare for class by watching videos or lectures about a subject in advance and then focus on more hands-on activities such as projects in class.

YouTube will still be in a restricted content mode, allowing only certain videos to be viewed by students, but Flick says that the technology staff will continue to look into other options for useful tools.

“We’ll keep playing with some more stuff,” Flick said.