I just came across an interesting post on the SearchReSearch blog about how to force YouTube links to open full screen. (Almost. It actually opens in a full browser window.) Apparently, all you need to do is to replace the “watch” in the URL with “watch_popup”. As an example, here is a link to a quick video I did for this site last week: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbsknyHYqEo
If you click that link, you will see the video in the middle of the page and it will be surrounded by other images and text (see right). This is potentially distracting to students, as they may choose to click a “more interesting” video and end up off task. On the other hand, this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=XbsknyHYqEo, will bring you to a full browser version of the video.
This is obviously something that would be useful in education, as you can help to reduce distraction.
I generally use embedding to add YouTube videos to my blog posts and Moodle courses, but I can see where this would be useful.
What do you think, interesting trick?