100 ways to use a VLE – #71 Embedding video

So you may be old enough to remember the launch of Channel 4 (or even BBC 2 and ITV) however in this day of Freeview, Sky and cable; our learners have access to 24 hour television and hundreds of channels.

However many people are deserting the traditional home of video, moving away from watching video on television and watching video on YouTube.

The statistics of YouTube are amazing.

In September 2008 I reported on my blog that 13 hours of video were been uploaded to YouTube every minute!

Now 20 hours of video are being uploaded every minute!

Now one of the nice features of services such as YouTube is that you can embed the video into a webpage.

This means that you needn’t worry about configuring a streaming server, encoding video, etc…

As a result it is very easy now to upload video to the web, and insert (well embed) that video into any webpage of your choice, which means pages on a VLE.

Now one of the issues you may find with your VLE is that the security settings restrict you using embedding code on pages or discussions forums on your VLE; this is certainly the case with Moodle.

So you’ve embedded the video, what next?

It’s not just about the video, you can’t just place a video on the VLE and expect it to do everything. As with video in the classroom, you need to consider the video in the context of the learning activity. You may example ask your learners to watch a short video clip and comment on the video in a VLE discussion forum. Another example would be to use a video to reinforce a resource on the VLE.