Best Practices for Editing and Sharing a Lesson in a Google Environment?

Hello Everyone-

I’m wondering if anyone has any insight on a specific user case I’m trying to solve.  I’m quite new at this, and most everything I’ve been able to figure out is self-taught, mainly through these forums.  There’s just this one thing I can’t figure out.

We’re a Google district, and our students are using Minecraft Education on Chromebooks.  We’ve worked out the challenges of getting the app in the Play Store for only the students we want to have it, getting those students licenses, logging in with Microsoft credentials, and so on.  Some bumps in the road, but we got there.

Like most if not all districts in NY State, because of decisions made at the State Department of Education, we are required to block YouTube for students.  Many lessons in the library use YouTube links, which our students now can’t access.  What we want is for a staff member to be able to take a lesson from the library, modify it to change the YouTube links, and easily share that with students.

I’ve figured out how to do all of that- albeit not necessarily easily.  This is our current practice- can anyone please suggest any improvements to this?  Again, this is all self-taught.   And there’s one point that I can’t quite figure out, which I’ll detail at the end:

• Staff member gets the lesson from the library
• Staff member edits the lesson to replace YouTube links by toggling the /wb function on and then off
• Staff member saves and then exports the edited lesson to Google Drive
• Staff member makes that Drive file sharable, and gets the link directly to the file
• Staff member makes an assignment in Classroom, and adds that link to the assignment.

We figured out, with the help of the forums, that you need to use the link, otherwise students won’t get prompted to download the file.  Using the “add from Drive” method in Classroom doesn’t prompt the student to download it.  From there...

• Student goes into Classroom and clicks the link to the file in Drive from the assignment
• Student clicks the 3 dots in the upper right corner of the preview screen, and chooses “Open in New Tab”
• That prompts a Window with a download option, so student downloads it from there
• Student opens the file they downloaded, which then creates a new World just for themselves.  Each student in the class now has their own copy of the modified world, with the YouTube links edited to accessible links (Watchkin or embedded in Slides, BTW).

Can we be doing this in a better way than I just described?

The one little sticky widget I can’t figure out- is there any way to save and share the file so that the player starts in the World where the original file from Lessons would have had them start?  We’re finding that the staff member who edits the file has to return to the spot in the World where they started in the lesson template before they save that file and share it.  I hope I’m explaining that well.  

Related (I think) to that, what’s the difference between a .mcworld file and a .mctemplate file? In the process I described, we’re sharing the .mcworld file.  How does that differ from sharing a .mctemplate file and, if it does, how do you save the file as a .mctemplate?

It would be really, really nice to not have to do all this.  I’m reading that there are current alternative options in Beta form, but it appears they take a fair amount of setup on the IT side.  If we could just share a customized World right in the program as easily as we can share a World from the Lessons section, that would be really neat.  But we’re figuring it out using other methods.

Any feedback or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you!