Yesterday we talked about linking to resources, but sometimes you may want to put classroom resources directly into the page. Here is one of the pages for my faculty website with a PowerPoint presentation embedded into it. My students are old enough to access it on their own, and I can also easily use it in the classroom with a projector.
I made the presentation with Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 and used Camtasia Studio to make it into a video. I made it for The Pursuit of Happiness, where you will find some interesting teaching resources on happiness for high school and college students.
Here’s a page with an embedded Google Doc. As we work on our group document, the things we write will show up on this page. That allows students to get involved with the group essay without needing any special technical skills — it’s like a wikki, but it’s private to our class website and it’s embedded into my site.
For Google Docs, YouTube videos, or any other resource with a “share” button, it’s easy to embed the resource. Just click on the share button, and then on the embed button.
You can find both these buttons in the screen shot above: “share” is right below the video on the right and “embed” — which doesn’t show till after you click on the “share” button — is in the bottom left hand corner.
There’s some code showing in the box. You copy this (CTRL+C) and then paste (CTRL+V) it into the HTML editor in your web editor, or directly into the HTML right where you want it to show.
If you use WordPress for your classroom site, we recommend the WordPress Video Plugin. It makes the process very easy. Your content management system may also allow you just to use the URL (web address). The screenshot below shows the screen you get when you push the “share” button at PursuitofHappiness.org. You can see that it’s similar to YouTube, and most are. Once you’ve mastered one, you’ll find it easy to figure out all the others.
There are so many things that you can embed into your site! Make your PowerPoints into videos as I did and upload them at YouTube for the easiest process. Use Picasa to embed slideshows, or make them into videos and upload to YouTube. Add Wolfram Alpha Widgets and Google Gadgets for lots of interesting functionality, much of which is educational. Read Digital Inspiration’s post about embedding stuff if you want to embed more things. Remember to think about copyright (so you can talk to your students about plagiarism with a clear conscience), but otherwise the sky’s the limit!
Your website is also a great place to share student work.
