Want to use YouTube but not have kids distracted by kittens surrounding the video? There's an app for that.

Using videos is as old as the hills, and so are some of the videos being used to teach key ideas in our classrooms. If you're my vintage you might recall the old Commander video system where the teacher called the library and had a cued-up VCR play through a TV bolted to the wall, cursing when the brick-sized remote failed to pause or rewind at vital moments. Now we can use our digital projectors or Interactive White Boards to show online clips from around the world at a whim.

With all that in mind, I thought now was a good time to share the rules I have developed for using online videos in class:

Deal with the YouTube distraction machine

YouTube is awesome. It's also custom-built to turn your 1-video teachable moment into a kitten-playing-with-balloon-shaped-like-llama-on-top-of-birthday-cake multi-clip extravaganza. If you want to make it through in one piece there are a couple of neat little options to make life easier.

My current beloved is "Turn off the Lights", which you can get here for Chrome and here for Firefox. Think of it as a dimmer switch for everything except the video, letting you (and the kids) focus on the clip itself.

There's also the issue of having 2 minutes of awesome in the middle of a 4-minute video. If you don't have the time to slice and dice offline then you can use Tube Chop, which lets you edit any YouTube clip in-browser and then gives you a link to your new customised version.

Regardless, there are over 10 billion videos currently on YouTube. To help educators deal with this embarrassment of riches (and LOLcats) YouTubeEDU was launched in December of 2011. This service groups all the videos tagged as educational or from reliable sources into categories ranging from subject matter to age of audience. Comments and related videos are also absent to eliminate distractions.

There is more out there than YouTube

Whilst the 800-pound gorilla of the online video world is often considered a one-stop shop for classroom clips, it pays to search a little more widely for both short and long-form videos. Here are three alternatives to get you started:

Vimeo

Art, Drama and ICT teachers, front and centre for this one. Vimeo prides itself on being a community site with videos rather than the other way around. Short film-makers and animators will post both works-in-progress and final cuts for you to dissect and discuss, and the Education section is an amazing resource for students who could use some tips on film-making.

TeacherTube

TeacherTube was launched in 2007 as an alternative to YouTube, which canny IT admins had already been blocking access to. They have arranged partnerships with NASA and the American History Channel, so there's some groovy exclusive content. The site has expanded over the years to include sections for audio and documents, so some careful searching will get you a host of possible resources. However, please note my use of the word 'careful' - the site is tough to navigate.

ABC iView and SBS on Demand

Too many mornings have I walked into a staff room to hear a conversation about a program or doco that ends with 'I wish I recorded it!'. If you have an amazing teacher-librarian with some nifty tech you may luck out, but for the rest of us there are these excellent streaming 'catch-up' services. Both give you access to shows that have aired in the last two weeks, with some shows available permanently, including the brilliant doco 'Go Back To Where You Came From'. Please note that the IT ninjas at both networks have made these sites impossible to download from, so plan accordingly.

This leads me to my next point:

Try not to stake your video-enhanced lesson on a functioning Internet connection

I did a stint in a school with a net connection so dodgy the IT staff were at the point of blaming the ghost of a long-departed teacher. From then on I've made my own luck by downloading a copy of any video I think is worth showing. I use two programs for this, both are browser based.

For YouTube clips, nothing beats the Chrome extension YouTube Downloader. This adds a button below the YouTube clip that looks exactly like the 'add' and 'share' buttons but says 'Download'. It gives you every resolution and format option available, including downloading an audio-only MP3 file.

For everything else there's the Firefox based Ant Video Downloader. This cute little add-on lurks at the top of the browser bar and runs a tiny animation when it detects the video on the webpage you're currently viewing. Click the magic button and get a copy dumped to the hard drive location of your choosing.

You may have just grabbed a lovely clip from the tube site of your choice, but both Windows Media Player and Quicktime are still prone to falling over when confronted with FLV files. So, last tip:

Have a good playback program

For both Mac and PC the answer is simple - VLC. This venerable program will play ANYTHING, even incomplete files. It has a dirt-simple interface and is low-power. Teachers, if you don't already have this program installed the school's IT team will let you have it with a smile on their face - it has a reputation that stretches back to 1996.

For you iOS-enabled educators, I've had good experiences with flex:player for the iPhone (free) and AVPlayerHD for the iPad ($2.99). Over on Android there's the well-reviewed MoboPlayer. However, if you're going to try video output I recommend trialling it BEFORE the class starts - few lesson plans survive first contact with technical adversity!