One surefire way to make sure you’re creating an engaged studio that logs in to their MTH accounts on a regular basis is by putting interesting stuff in your Studio News. A great feature of the studio website creation tools is that you can embed HTML in areas of the site such as the Studio Announcements that can go either on your site’s home page or in the student login area.
If you’re new to Music Teacher’s Helper, you can update your studio announcements via the following sequence of menus from the MTH dashboard:
Home —> My Studio Website —> Studio Announcements
Click on Add Announcements and you’re ready to start the sequence of steps that will allow you to rock your Studio News with cool new videos.
1. Start a new browser window or tab, go to YouTube and pick a video that has embedding enabled. The embed code is in the blue box to the right of the video. You can find the embed code just below the video information and the URL code.
2. Copy the embed code.
3. Return to the News & Announcements page, click on the “Add Annoucement” link if you haven’t already done so, and then click on “Source” at the top left of the text editor. This will call up the HTML layer of the text editor so code can be manually added.
4. Paste the embed code that you copied from YouTube. The video you embedded will now show on your site, although it will be way too wide for the narrow Studio News sidebar. The cool part comes next–we’re going to tweak the code to make the video fit.
5. Change the width value to 160 and the height value to 132. Be sure to note that width and height values are listed twice in the embed code, once in the object width values and once in the embed source near the end of the code–you’ll need to change four values in all, two for width and two for height.
6. Now finish the Studio Announcement posting. Make sure that the “Show this announcement” dialog is set to “On my studio website home page”. Also add a title, text introducing the video just above the embed code, determine how long you want the posting to show and where it is in the post order.
Then click Save, go to your home page, and observe the power of multimedia to create an engaging studio website!
Here’s what I’ve done so far with this embed technique. Try it out for yourself and leave your website URLs in the comments for us to see more Studio News mini-videos in the wild.
Awesome idea!!! Thanks so much for the instructions, I’m going to do this right now…
Hey Chris,
How great to see David! Does he know that he’s been featured? The video of the week is going to become a new feature on my website. Thanks for the idea and the how too!
Great idea! Can you do this with your own videos or do you have to post them to youtube first and then embed them? I’d really like to just film my students and let them see themselves.
Leah, show us what you came up with!
Craig, perhaps I should mention David’s cameo appearance on his Facebook wall
Lisa, you’ll have to film the video, upload it to YouTube, and then use the embed feature. However, you should make sure your students are okay with being broadcast on a video sharing site.
Click on the links to Leah’s and Craig’s studio sites to see some mini-videos in the wild…
Thank you–your instructions were clear and worked perfectly for me the FIRST time!