Over the past week,  students have been abuzz about the new YouTube restrictions. Many students have been struggling in their extracurriculars over the past week.

“In Break Dance Club, we spend a lot of time pulling up dance videos and videos we need the choreography from,” CJ Bonner ‘17 said. “Because of the restrictions, we can’t do that anymore.”

Break Dance isn’t the only club that’s been making complaints. Many in  school activities that require YouTube have been having issues with the new restrictions as well.

“The new restrictions make theatre classes more difficult and they disrupt my learning environment,” Emily Perkins ‘18 said. “I’m also the officer of a club, and we occasionally show videos, now we’ll have to come up with new activities, that disrupts club activity too.”

A lot of students have been having issues with the new restrictions during their classes, after school, and in the library. However, some have found ways to get around them.

“There are a lot of secondhand videos with inappropriate content that you can still find in other ways,” Bonner said.

Teachers have also been said to be struggling with these new restrictions while they’re teaching.

“Teachers now have to create spur of the moment lessons when their videos won’t load,” Perkins said. “In visual arts classes we usually upload [our work] to YouTube, now there’s no way to share and watch my assignments for class.”

While the new system has reduced high schoolers’ access to video, it has opened up new possibilities for younger students.

“I think [the new restrictions] are great,” Ms. Natosha Daniels of the ITS Department said. “This is the first time elementary school kids can have YouTube.”

There are other practical considerations that the YouTube EDU program addresses.

“When these kids stream their videos, the school’s bandwidth gets eaten up,” Ms. Daniels said. “That takes away from the teachers and the other students who are using it for educational purposes.”

If a student believes that a video should be allowed for education benefit, there is a process in place for requesting it to be unblocked. If you want to submit a video for consideration, you can fill out this form until the end of today or talk to a teacher. For more information, you can check out the Round Rock ISD website.