Quite often you have a YouTube video where only a small part of it is relevant to your students (such as a single 3 minute interview in a 30 minute clip), or you just want to draw particular attention to an excerpt (for example, a specific movement within a piece of music or the buildup to a goal during a football match). Previously, you would point the students to the clip with instructions to watch the 8th to 12th minutes and hope that they wouldn’t get distracted by the rest of the video, the comments and related video links.

The good news is that you can now specify the part of the video that is to be played and it will begin and end at the points you state. Here is an example where we are only interested in watching the opening credit sequence, which starts 10 seconds in and lasts for 10 seconds.

1. Get the address of the video from your browser address bar, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUZjzQuTNX4
2. Remove the part that says ‘watch?’, replace ‘=’ with ‘/’ and add a ‘?’ to the end, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/v/dUZjzQuTNX4?
3. Work out how many seconds in you want the video to start at (10 seconds for our example) and add ‘start=’ followed by the number of seconds to the address, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/v/dUZjzQuTNX4?start=10.
4. Work out the end point based on seconds from the start of the video (20 for our example – 10 + 10) and add ‘&end=’ followed by the number of seconds to the address, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/v/dUZjzQuTNX4?start=10&end=20

That’s it! You can now use this address in emails, post it to Blackboard, etc. You could also specify just a start point or end point at step 3 instead, if that would better suit your needs.

Although it may look complicated at first, it is fairly quick and easy to do and makes it much easier to keep people focused on the parts of a video that you want them to watch.