Blogger as a Teacher Website: YouTube Video Advantage

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Blogger makes a great fit for the elementary teacher and their website. It is an easy way for the teacher to keep parents, students, and the community informed about what kinds of learning activities are happening. Not only that, but it makes updating your teacher website exciting as it doesn't require much time at all.

In my previous post about Blogger, I mentioned the ability to have students be the authors of your blog. You can then have the students email you their posts with a combination of pictures/text. You forward it on to your Blogger address, and it appears as one of your drafts. (If your students have open email, you could have them email your blog directly.)

Now what to do about video? Since Blogger and YouTube are both Google products, they work extremely well together. With your YouTube account, you have a separate email address you can use to email videos directly to your Youtube account. Just have your students email you their video (you might be limited on the length of video depending upon the email settings), clean up the email of any extra text, change the subject to what you want the title to be, and email it to your YouTube exclusive email address. Then, just like magic, it is in your collection of videos.

So why would you want to email videos in this manner? Can't you just upload your video directly to Blogger.?That is true, but there is actually a limit of space in your Blogger account. To avoid this issue, you can take advantage of YouTube's generosity and unbelievable video hosting. This is great because when you click on the insert video icon while posting, the words "My Youtube videos" appear. You can then select your video from your collection and insert it. No extra copying and pasting of codes or links.

To see it in action, watch the following:

To be honest, I still copy embed codes and paste them into the HTML on my blog. Main reason being that I can adjust the size of the video as I want, and I can get rid of suggested videos at the end because the option to turn that off is available when you copy the embed code on a YouTube video. However, the method shown in the video above works well if you are not super confident in using HTML code.