Hangouts on Air and YouTube Live Now an Item

I am always looking for new and innovative ways to make important content more easily accessible for my parents and students. In a prior post, I talked about how to take YouTube and use it to get info out to your stakeholders. This post is a follow-up – with a video demo below – about extending the use of YouTube in an exciting new way.

Just this week – Google’s Hangouts On Air feature, which lets you hangout with up to 10 others and broadcast it live online while recording the video automatically, has moved and become embedded into YouTube Live. We have used Google’s Hangouts on Air for our School Counseling On Air series a few years back, which I think is due for a return in this coming school year. This tool allows us to collaborate, and in my instance, share information live with anyone that has internet connectivity.

In the video below (recorded WITH YouTube Live and the Hangouts feature), I will show you the basic requirements and how easy it is to set up.

There are a few required and suggested pre-requisites:

Required

• You will need a YouTube account to use so I suggest creating a YouTube Channel that is either for your program or your school. As always, check with your district policies prior to striking out on this project. Click here for Google’s tutorial on creating a channel on YouTube. There are a few other things to enable extended recording (Click here to learn about becoming verified and click here for the Live Streaming Guide).
• You will also need a recording device for both audio and video. You can use your webcam on a laptop and the mic included with that, but the quality and ability of that will be typically limited. See below for suggested options to optimize your YouTube experience.
• Ability to get the info out about the live broadcasts and recordings – this may be email, social media, robo-calls, etc.

Suggested

• My latest setup includes an upgraded (and more mobile) studio quality microphone and webcam for recording. These are school items that we bought for our whole school to use (but I am the one who uses them the most!). We use the Yeti USB Mic by Blue Microphones and it is really easy to use and has studio quality recording (~$130 at time of post). For our webcam – we use the Full HD Logitech C920 USB Webcam to record the video component (~$68 at time of post). The C920 has the highest rated reviews from my research into HD webcams. See the video recording to see how to adjust which device is used for recording video or sound if you will not use the devices on your laptop or other device.

Since this change just happened, I have only had the opportunity to record a few events live. Before this – I had to record on my old cell phone and then upload to YouTube, wait for processing, edit some, wait for processing again and then publish. This takes about a week of time. With the YouTube Live, not only can people view the stream live from anywhere – people can send in questions via chat, rewind to catch something they missed and the archived video is immediately available for viewing by anyone who didn’t make the event.

This is another video that I had to record after the fact because my phone had a malfunction and didn’t record the live event so I used YouTube Live to do a screencast and talked over it.