Whether you run a business or school, every student and employee undoubtedly enjoys YouTube in some way. Occasionally they may sneak a few short videos in here and there, and more power to them, however! This causes a distraction and ultimately disrupts the working or educational environment. In this article, we'll cover how any company, school or organization has the power to block all of YouTube or just restrict parts of it, filtering out the distractions and allowing the educational!
Google offers three primary ways to restrict YouTube via DNS restriction, HTTP headers and Chromebooks. Each follow very simple steps provided by Google. You'll learn just how easy it is to restrict the video playing giant.
When you go to restrict the DNS of YouTube, you are essentially restricting the entirety of YouTube. A DNS block prevents a user from accessing a site. Here are the steps to setting up a DNS restriction for YouTube:
If you need much more strict restrictions for YouTube, add restrict.youtube.com as a CNAME for the above domains. If you need a moderate restriction, use restrictmoderate.youtube.com as a CNAME as for the above domains.
It's also very important to not give a CNAME to these particular domains:
If you were to change the CNAME for these hostnames, YouTube will lost it's ability to function properly.
To restrict YouTube via an HTTP header, follow this step:
If you wish to have a more strict restriction for YouTube access, enable the HTTP header, "YouTube-Restrict: Strict". For a moderate restriction, simply change Strict to Moderate.
Restricting a Chromebook requires an admin to set an enrolled Chromebook into Restricted Mode. This only applies if your Chromebook is enrolled in an organization's Admin console.
To set up user policies for Restricted Mode:
GSuite Apps for Education admins may be able to completely restrict YouTube, but there's a more beneficial to keep YouTube useful and less of a distraction and more of a educational process. You can moderate and add exceptions to particular YouTube user channels to allow students to view only accepted channels. There's a process of adding YouTube video and channel approvers.
The process of doing so is as follows:
Restricting YouTube may have been a daunting process in the past, but GSuite Apps easily dispels this factor and creates an incredibly simple way of eliminating YouTube distractions. Here at Coolhead Tech, we will always be available to provide professional assistance and advice to those who need help with anything to do with GSuite Apps for Work / Education, Chromebooks, and anything in between. If you're interested, feel free to access our blog at Coolhead Tech!