Hello,
Over 2 billion youtube videos are viewed per day, and users upload 24 hours of video footage every minute (from http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet). Youtube is a website that allows registered users a place to upload, store, and share video clips. It can be described as the ‘flickr’ of the video world. The nice aspect of youtube is that it also allows users access to the exact html link to where each video is stored. Like the flickr website, this aspect of youtubes website is great for embedding video footage into any type of web document you could imagine.
Before researching youtube for this blog entry, I previously would visit youtube to see tv highlights that I had heard about but couldn’t access because my wife and I don’t have cable tv. I’ve currently watched so many canucks highlights that a regular speed hockey game seems too slow for me now…..I just want to skip to the highlight reel. Lol. I think that this type of easy access is a key element in youtube’s success. The download time is so fast that it delivers what users want in a speed that’s not boring. It does seem ironic though that in an age of lcd, led, plasma tv’s and high definition standards, that youtube users accept average quality video. I guess it depends on the age and components of your computer as well as the type of video recording equipment the ‘uploader’ used, but some of the videos are quite ‘grainy’ and of poor quality but no one seems to mind. Youtube does offer a ‘full-screen’ button to enlarge the video size but this only magnifies poor quality video footage. The better quality of video does mean larger file types so maybe youtube keeps the file size lower and the quality lower so that it can boast having billions of hours of video footage available with a click of a mouse.
It was quite easy to set up a youtube account. Like all the other web 2.0 tools, youtube allowed me to create an account based of my existing ‘google’ email account that I use for flickr, blogger, and google sites. One gets a good idea of just how many users are registered on youtube when you try to make a unique screen name and realise most of the straight forward names are already taken. New user names must include symbols and numbers to be accepted as unique. After creating an account I made a few short videos with my Nikon D90 digital camera. I then plugged the camera memory card into my computer and downloaded the video files. The video files were then uploaded to my youtube account and are now stored on my account.
My three videos were of a record playing on my record player. I tried to link the videos to the portion of the math 8/9 curriculum that focuses on symmetry, more specifically rotational symmetry and the topics ‘angle of rotation’ and ‘degree of symmetry’. These videos would act as warm-up activities as we entered into the symmetry section. In the future I thought of taking an old record and drawing designs on it so students could better keep track of the rotations.
After making and posting a few short videos using my camera, I wanted to see how to embed these videos within a website of blog page. I then went to youtube and typed in ‘how to embed youtube videos’. From the results page, I clicked on the first video entry that matched my search description. The video I clicked on was a 4-minute video showing exactly how to embed youtube videos in web pages and blogs.
The major key was finding and copying the source code in html format. This was a very similar process to embedding flickr photo slideshows from the previous exercise. This youtube video also went over changing the size of the video as well. Not the file size of the video, but the actual display size of the video screen that would appear on the web page. Within the html code page there were two, three-digit numbers that related to the height and width of the screen size. The video also showed how to insert some html code within the web page so that the video would play automatically as soon as the web page was accessed. On the html screen of a given webpage, just prior to the words ‘&’ one could insert the phrase ‘&autoplay=1’ and your youtube video would start automatically on your webpage or blog. Special thanks to ‘Bummarketer’ who created the youtube video that I watched to learn how this task was completed. The youtube link to his video was http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSz_a_yx9hA
The ‘autoplay’ feature is a great ideal for some applications but I’m not exaclty sure how it would work on a blog page where there’s more than one youtube video. Would all the videos start at once? Would the most recent video start and then be followed by the most recent video after that? I will definitely research this more in the future of my youtube use.
Please see my embedded videos on the blog post below.
Thanks. -Regen
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