Build a Teacher/Student Collaborative Website with Google Sites–Part 4–Videos & Pictures

by Jeffrey Thomas on February 17, 2011

Adding videos and pictures to your Google Sites classroom site is probably the most fun and satisfying part of maintaining a site. Everyone loves videos and pictures. For a classroom site, it is perfect for documenting highlights from the current school year. You may wish to add photos from a field trip, instructional videos, sporting events and so on. Furthermore, students and parents love this feature as it brings a multimedia aspect to your site.

Google Sites makes it very easy to add photos and videos–Take a look:

TCEA 2011 Google Sites “Adding Videos and Pictures” 6 of 8

As you just saw, adding videos and pictures is fun and easy in Google Sites. There is one warning when adding the Picasa web album. When you paste the URL, make sure it is not the secure URL! In English, that means the start of the URL should be http:// NOT https:// If it is the secure URL, just delete the “s” after you paste it into Google Sites.

One problem with adding videos in Google Sites is that your only choices are YouTube and Google Videos. However, you are not limited to this selection. Unfortunately, that means you must delve a little bit into the HTML section of Google Sites. The good thing is that it only entails copy and paste-no actual coding.

I’ve prepared a short video to show you how. We didn’t plan to get into this during our presentation but there were questions from the audience at TCEA on how to do it so we added it to the presentation. Take a look: