English video lessons can really make the classroom fun and interesting. There are many excellent reasons to incorporate a modern and highly produced video into your English class lessons. It raises students interest in the targeted language of the lesson, provides visual and auditory reinforcement of your target language and students can easily access it again after the lesson is done.  Finding the best videos can be a challenge so I gathered together the top 5 websites where amazing videos for English video lessons can be found.

I am not focusing on “Learn English Instructional Videos” at all. I am focusing on videos about cool topics to show your class that will spark speaking activities, discussions, writing activities, and listening activities on highly relevant and modern topics that you can pick to tailor to your student’s interests.

I won’t go into how to teach with these videos in this post (I’ve got so many ideas on that I put a whole free email course together on it – access it here) but I will direct you to the 5 best places to get the most suitable videos to center communicative speaking English video lessons around.  Also I will point out some really useful tools for teachers that make it way easier for you to manage and show the videos in class.

FIRST the Obvious…
YOU TUBE

Yes I know, no big Earth shattering mystery here. However, let me direct you to some corners of YouTube that you are likely to find videos extremely well suited for the English video lesson classroom.

WWW.YOUTUBE.COM/TEACHERS
Great place to find educationally relevant videos organized and classified into academic topics.  There are many other channels like this and another good one is GCFLearnFree. Also this is a Huge List of others organized by topic here, they are categorized into many topics and include 101 Channels.

SOME OF MY FAVORITE CHANNELS
Science – AsapScience, SciShow, Veritasium, American National History Museum
Myth Busting – Mental Floss, It’s OK to Be Smart
Modern Fun Topics – Mashable
Modern News Topics – News Direct

The best way of course is just to use keyword searches to find great stuff tailor made for you student’s interests. Here are a list of twelve videos I have picked out for my English video lesson classes and made cool lesson plans around.

SECOND the Inspirational…
TED VIDEOS

Ted Talks, Ted-Ed, or Tedx videos are usually kept short and to the point. They gather the best minds from around the globe to speak and present on something they are experts on in their given field. These presentations are very inspirational, passionate, modern and well produced. The topics are just endless, 1000’s of English video lessons can be made from the Ted Library all for free.

THIRD the Spectacular…
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

You can expect the best production from NG without a doubt, all videos are in super high definition. They are highly produced, high budget and just simply breathtaking to watch. Most of the clips up on the National Geographic website for free consumption are 1-4 minutes in length making them perfect for English video lessons. The variety of topics available for free is just as vast as what they publish in their magazine and broadcast on their TV channels.

FOURTH the Categorized Educational…
NEOK12 / WATCHLEARNKNOW

Both websites NeoK12 and WatchLearnKnow actually give a lot of organization ahead of time for you by categorizing their free video libraries for fast and easy browsing. These videos are also usually under 5 minutes long and highly focused into topics found in most school curriculum in a broad range of academic topics.

FIFTH Ready Made English Video Lessons…
ESL VIDEO

This website ESL Video hosts English video lessons that teachers have already created with self checking quizzes. It is a collective database of user created content (UCC). Other teachers have found videos, made quiz type questions for them and posted them all here to share and share-a-like. You can find really well done, ready to teach videos complete with self checking quizzes already made for you. You can keyword search or just browse by difficulty level (Beginning, Low Intermediate, Intermediate, Advanced and New Quizzes).

TOOL#1  –  Download any video from YouTube

This tool is great if you want to have a hard copy of the YouTube video for yourself. Maybe you don’t have an internet connection in the classroom. Or maybe the video you spend lots of time making a lesson plan around gets taken off YouTube. Well this is so easy to use. Just simple type “ss” right in the url of the video just before the word “youtube.com” in the url.

For example just add it in like this. “http://ssyoutube.com/watch?v=oDAw7vW7H0c&feature=youtu.be”

It will take you to another website to download the video onto your computer instantly.

TOOL #2 – Remove all comments, advertising, and suggested videos from the page.

ViewPure is a great tool that you simply copy/paste the video url into and then ViewPure will strip away everything but the video and its controls. Brilliant if you don’t want your students distracted by all the other elements that appear on the page when viewing a video.