This is a demonstration on embedding a YouTube movie into your blackboard discussion forum. So, to do that, just first go to YouTube and find the video that you want to embed and I am going to use this Mona Lisa with Microsoft Paint video. When you find the video, then look on the right and you should see a URL and an embed code. Copy the URL, not the embed code. So, I just click on it. It will highlight it, right click while you’re pointing to the blue area and click Copy and that will copy that code to the clipboard of your computer and then before you leave, you might just want to look here under the Customize and it will show you some standard dimensions for videos. If you click there, notice that you have 320×265, 425×344 and so forth. Those are just some good even multiple dimensions for the YouTube videos. I like to post my videos in at either 425×344 or 480×385. So, we’ll put this one in at 480×385, so that’s 480 wide by 385 high. So, you don’t need to copy anything and you don’t even really need to look at this. I just did this to show you what some of the standard dimensions are. So, 480×385 is what we want to use.
So, once you have your video URL copied, go to your Blackboard course. Go to the forum that you want to post in and you can start a new Thread or a reply to a Thread either one. Fill it out as normal and then put your cursor where you want the video to appear and then on the toolbar, click the red f, that’s your Flash icon. So, click on that. A new window will open and in the window, you’re going to specify the source URL. So, put your cursor there and then paste that URL into the blog. The easy way to paste is just to hold down the Ctrl key and press V as in Victor. Then, before you leave, you need to go to that URL and we need to change it a little bit. All your YouTube videos will always have a watch and a question mark followed by a v. So, put your cursor and we’re going to delete the watch and question mark and leave the v and then after the v, put another forward slash in, that’s where your question mark key is and then delete the equal sign. So, you’re going to change your URL to this.
Once you’ve done that, go down and set the width and height of your video to what we had said earlier. And remember, we said we were going to have a 480 width by a 385 height. Now, you could set this to anything but if you don’t keep them in proportion, then your video is going to be skewed. So, you use one of those standard widths. That’s why we looked at those standard widths at YouTube.
So, set that and then, you can leave these other settings to default values and then click Submit. You should get a preview screen that shows your video here if you entered everything properly. Click Submit again and now, your video will be embedded in your forum post or reply. When you see it, you can do more editing here if you want. I am just going to put my cursor there and remove that extra space. You could type more information. You could go below the video and enter information. You could go back and put in another video if you want; two or three videos. It doesn’t matter. But when you’re finished, then hit Submit like normal and when someone comes to view your post, they should see the video in your post. They should be able to click on it and play the video straight in the post.
Now, keep in mind that some Kentucky school districts, not all but quite a few do block the viewing of YouTube videos in the school districts. Filter will filter out the videos, so they won’t be able to view them. They should be able to view these outside the school districts in their server districts that do allow YouTube videos.
I’ll make another video later to show you how to embed a TeacherTube video and a video from some other video hosting sites. There are literally tons of them out there. So, it’s really just a preference if you use videos to whether you want to have a hyperlink to it or embed it in the content but if you do want to embed video in a content of your post, this is an easy way to do it.
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