Finding Videos Viewed Outside of YouTube

How do you support students watching too many videos or choosing poor video topics? By searching Themes, Categories or Signatures associated with video content, you can uncover niche and local hosts of videos.

The steps below typically uncover two types of videos - recorded and live streaming. Recorded videos are similar to the content viewed on YouTube, and you can often view the original video by going to the web address. In contrast, streaming media are usually live broadcasts, and a replay of the original video may not be available after the event.

School Manager displays a total of the data downloaded in a single visit to a web page. If you think the web page contained video content, you can approximate how many minutes a user may have watched a video by dividing the download size in School Manager.

• Social media websites often embed small videos using about 1.5 MB of data per minute.
• Entertainment sites typically use a minimum of 4 MB of data per minute
• Subscription streaming services, like Netflix, may send 10 MB of data per minute

When you investigate websites with large downloads, look for keywords in the website path like the words “watch”, “video”, “tv”, and “live”. If you open a website hosting a live streaming video, research the web pages containing schedules and look at the promotions to identify the video topics.

Investigating Where a User Is Accessing Videos

Use these steps to review videos viewed on websites most likely to contain embedded videos or live-stream events.

1. Go to Statistics > Active Users and select a user’s name.
2. In the User Dashboard, go to Top Traffic Types and select View All. The Apps and Websites report will open up filtered for your selected User.
3. Click the column titled Total transfer to sort by size. Click again until the largest number is on top of the list. Look at the names of the top Categories and Application or Websites. Usually, the largest transfer is in gigabytes (GB).
4. Go to the Search box and type one of the following Themes, Categories or Signatures:
   
   • Arts and Entertainment (Theme)
   • News (Category)
   • Social Networking (Signature)

5. Find the Application or Website names for rows with Download greater than 4MB.
6. Investigate the content by clicking on the Application or Website name to see what dates and how much content was accessed.
   
   • Find the rows with Download subtotals greater than 4MB and click on the Date. The user’s timeline will open and be filtered for the app or website you are investigating.
   • (Optional) Copy the web address. Open a new browser window and paste the web address. Review the pages, promotions, and browse the menus.
7. (Optional) Select Export Report and save the CSV (Comma Separated Values) file as a record to use in discussions with the student.
8. (Recommended) Return to the User’s Dashboard and repeat steps 5 through 8 to search for another Theme, Category, or Signature associated with video content.

Gigabyte (GB) is the largest, followed by megabyte (MB), then kilobyte (KB), and byte (B) is the smallest. Check the Upload column for transfers over 4MB to see if a user is potentially uploading videos, live streaming, or hosting multi-user games.

Supporting Students with Better Video Viewing

You can use the Apps and Websites results to discuss strategies for managing video viewing activities. As needed, talk to your IT support about adding a Content Filtering block rule for the inappropriate websites being frequently accessed. Google and YouTube work with educational filtering. 

You can use the Videos Report to YouTube activity from devices running Connect for Chrome and Connect for Windows. Your IT support can also enable Safe Search to omit explicit content from Google, Bing, and YouTube search results.