Maati Baani in my Canvas Homepage

As a follow-up to the post this morning testing the new YouTube embedding in WordPress, I wanted to say something about the power of YouTube embedding in general, especially embedding a video as part of a playlist. I include one video each day in my class announcements, and today’s announcements contain an AMAZING new video by Maati Baani:

Here’s how it looks inside my Canvas homepage; you can also visit the class directly yourself (no log-in required) by going to India.MythFolklore.net:

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I also include the entire video playlist of the Announcements in the sidebar of the announcements blog, as you can see here (that’s especially handy for students who might not always scroll down to see the whole blog post each day):

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Using playlists like this is great because it means if a student plays the current day’s video, the video will carry on to the next video and the next, and so on. At this point, the Announcements playlist has 74 videos in it as of right now (new video every day of the semester), so potentially all kinds of items of interest to the students.

I can also embed the playlist in the other blogs I use as part of the class, like this blog dedicated to the readings for the Myth-Folklore class; this week, it’s British and Celtic readings, and the video playlist is in the sidebar. It’s a teeny-tiny video, but you can see the Maati Baani video playing there:

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I really enjoy using embedded videos in this way: in blog posts, in sidebars, and therefore in Canvas too. My students feel the same way, and some of the most popular Tech Tips that I offer in class are for learning how to embed YouTube videos, create a playlist, etc. Embedding and linking: they are the superpowers of the Internet, opening up paths for creative students to explore.

Curiosity: the will to explore.

will

Crossposted at OU Canvas Community.

Testing YouTube Embed

I’m still learning WordPress as I go here, and thanks to a comment from Adam yesterday I learned how to turn off my moderation settings (I’ll see how that goes; I don’t moderate any of my Blogger blogs)… and he also alerted me to some smart embedding in WordPress now. Apparently, all I have to do to embed a YouTube video for example is to paste in the YouTube link. I’m going to test that out with Maati Baani’s FABULOUS new video and see how that goes, trying two different addresses; first will be a video link, and then I’ll try my Maati Baani playlist link.

I am so excited for this collaboration between Maati Baani and Mithoon; it means they have got almost a million views just within a couple days of the video being released. You can see Nirali and Kartik (who are Maati Baani; Nirali is singing, and Kartik is on guitar) on the video screens as the story is being told.

… wow, sure enough: they both work! I just pasted them in here to the visual editor view, and up popped the videos, ready to go!

Here’s the regular video link: Jammin‘.

Now let’s see what it does with a playlist link: Maati Baani. Sure enough: that works too — you just paste in the URL of the playlist, and it knows how to embed that also. Very nice! I like to use playlists with my class announcements; I’ll write up a separate post about that since it is Canvas-relevant.

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