The Power of Embedding
As an educator, I find myself posting content on a variety of online sources. In addition to semi-regular blogging, I manage several wikis, maintain a faculty home page, store and publish presentations on Google Docs, and I (somewhat reluctantly) use Blackboard for my ed tech classes. Many of those sources employ the same content. For example. a “How to Use Flickr Slidr” presentation might appear on my professional development blog for faculty, on Blackboard as a resource for my students, and as a URL on Google Docs. Reposting that document in numerous locations every time the original document needed to be modified would be time consuming and prone to mistakes. Besides, it violates my basic principle of doing work only once.
That’s why I find the idea of embedding media so powerful. Most online content services provide ways to embed media into a web page of just about any variety. All you need is a bit of site-generated code and authoring access to a web page. Blogs and wikis are great places to publish embedded media. Even stodgy old Blackboard will allow embedding and display of most media types. Imagine–you no longer have to upload a PowerPoint slide show to Blackboard and have your students download it for viewing. You can upload it Google Docs and embed it on Blackboard as a content item. Any changes you make to your slide show through Google Docs are immediately available to your students (it may require refreshing the Blackboard page) and it doesn’t take up any of your limited Blackboard storage space.
Embedding media is simply a matter of copy a few lines of code from a content service and pasting it into your blog, wiki, web page, Blackboard course site, or any other web page to which you have authoring privileges. The code is automatically generated by the content service site.
Here are a few of the content services that provide automatically generated code that can be copied and pasted into your sites:
- Flickr (photos)
- VoiceThread (voice and video annotated stories)
- Panraven (online storybooks)
- Google Docs (MS Office compatible word processing, presentation, and spreadsheet files; requires a Google account)
- Flickr Slidr (generates code for embedding Flick slide shows
- YouTube, and virtually every other video sharing site (videos)
There are some potential tradeoffs when using embedded media. For example, PowerPoint slide shows uploaded to Google Docs cannot have sound or animation. Careful authoring with these limitations in mind, however, usually results in useful and effective documents.
Below is an example of an embedded VoiceThread project, which I’ve chosen to present in a small size for faster access. Because I have allowed public comment on this project, video or voice annotations added to my original presentation on VoiceThread will automatically be reflected here, and vice versa.
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2 Responses to “The Power of Embedding”
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I’ve just recently discovered the simplicity and beauty of embedding documents. My AP English Language students are creating ePortfolios. They are discovering tons of tools that allow them to park files and embed them in their blogs, web pages, wikis–whereever. It’s not hard to max out the free space WordPress.com (or other hosts) gives. Using different services helps overcome this problem–all for FREE!
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for the comments, lhuff. I am thrilled to find your blog and have subscribed. I’m anxious to see more of what your students and you have created.
I love your blog title!