Teacher Discussion Forums

Some teachers have asked if it's possible to access You tube in China. Can it be done ? Yes quite easily.

I think when teachers ask you about watching youtube in china they are actually asking can it be done AND how can it be done.

I can not even open Utube in China.

My students told me that because of the great chinese firewall it was often difficult to get videos from youtube and even when you can, it's terribly slow. However there are two alternatives:

1. Use Baidu: http://video.baidu.com/
(My basic Chinese got me there and it does have some English language content.)

2. Download your videos before you go. If you don't know how to do this easily. You can see at: http://www.jamesabela.co.uk/intermediate/TV.html
It is best to take them either on a laptop or pen drive. Chinese customs occasionally try to stop 'piracy' by confiscating DVDs.

Hope this helps.

Youtube is blocked, but can be accessed over a proxy. Most free proxies are hit or miss and VERY slow. You can get a subscription to a VPN service that will allow you unfiltered access, but in my experience it's also too slow for classroom work.

Baidu is good as a previous poster mentioned, but also youku.com--the chinese youtube. It has a lot of English content and is very fast. You can usually find what you need by typing the english version but for more results try translating what you want to search for first. An easy way to translate is go to baidu.com and type the english terms in. Some of the results that come back will have the chinese translation.

This is more or less what the above post was talking about (ie downloading it ahead of time), but here is a real easy way of doing it:

I have not taught in China, so I don't know the technological issues involved, but if you have for example a laptop that connects to an overhead then you can use youtube the night before to get the videos ready without downloading them.

Let the video(s) finish loading in separate tabs or windows the night before, then disconnect from the internet but leave your computer on standby until you use it the next day. As long as the video is completely loaded, you don't have to be connected to watch it. That way, it doesn't matter how slow it is--you can load it for 6 hours the night before if you want.

Just a suggestion, I had the problem of not having internet connection at my school until I figured out this trick. Maybe you have to use classroom computers or something like that where you work, but I thought I would mention it just in case.