YouTube is amazing. With nearly 1 billion hours of uploaded video, the site hosts an impressive array of content germane to many topics in my courses. But YouTube is also a rabbit hole of distraction. I’ve gone to YouTube to watch a four-minute video on mitosis and left over an hour later having watched eight videos featuring farm animals attacking humans, nearly 14 minutes of carpool karaoke with Madonna and James Corden, and maybe 12 minutes of Queen at LIVE Aid. Thanks to increasingly savvy logarithms, the opportunities to click on other “suggested” videos are seemingly endless. And then there’s the cesspool of oftentimes caustic user commentary that continues to erode my faith in humanity.
Suffice it to say that sending students (or faculty) to YouTube to watch and think about only one video is like sending my 8-year old to a candy store to do her homework. It’s just not gonna happen. So my challenge has been how to use YouTube content without all of the distractions. My solution, detailed below, is to embed the YouTube video into my Moodle site and to do it such that only the video displays.
Read step-by-step instructions in the document embedded below.
Image credit: Rabbit Hole. By Amanvanasparesort (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
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