Starting today, Google offers a fresh take on YouTube for schools, students and teachers with “YouTube for Schools.” It’s a new network whose primary purpose is to present video content for training students, without the worry of spam or inappropriate content gunking up the minds of our little ones.

Google stressed that education with video and audio support is extremely important, but they recognize that students’ attention may be distracted by irrelevant clips on a given e-learning site.  YouTube for School was born to address the issue. YouTube for schools offers access to hundreds of thousands of educational videos on YouTube EDU. These include short lessons from the best teachers, complete courses from the best universities in the world, professional development for teachers, and other inspirational videos from opinion leaders.

According to YouTube’s official blog, the new project will have limited channels in which users receive all the training videos, documentaries, and theoretical explanations, complete courses from universities around the world or classes taught by teachers. All the contents will be shared on the website in one place so students will get all the required information without losing concentration. YouTube Partners are among the largest institutions in the industry such as TED, Smithsonian, Steve Spangler Science and Numberphile and 596 other video sources.

Project manager Brian Truong wrote in the blog post, “We’ve been hearing from teachers that they want to use the vast array of educational videos on YouTube in their classrooms, but are concerned that students will be distracted by the latest music video or cute cat, or a video that wasn’t appropriate for students.

“While schools that completely restrict access to YouTube may solve this distraction concern, they also limit access to hundreds of thousands of educational videos on YouTube that can help bring photosynthesis to life, or show what life was like in ancient Greece.”

The idea of this channel is to gather all the properly filtered educational material for use in schools without the risk of being able to link to other inappropriate content present in the portal, such as videos or comments related to anonymous users.  The Google project also claims that teachers can avail themselves of this service to provide classes with the largest multimedia content to adapt to new times.

In this way, YouTube seeks to normalize and assimilate the use of its platform as a safe and useful for tool in the field of education.  There’s more than 450,000 video’s hosted in this new service, ranging from home experiments to pronunciation classes in various languages. Further, each school can customize this channel to fit the specific needs of their class. All schools have access to all content of YouTube EDU, and teachers and administrators can connect to YouTube.com, where they can create playlists of videos that will be available in school.

YouTube is not the only social network hoping gain ground in schools.  Codecademy offers another interactive way to learn programming online, and provides actual coding and browser-based courses on programming for students. The company recently took in 2.5 million round of funding to add more contents, more features on the site. Codeschool is another company offering browser-based programming courses, but these courses aren’t free. SilionAngle is also working on our own open source educational project called SilliconAcademy offering educational content in social media formats.