You may have noticed that your Edublogs’ Visual Editor is missing the Embed Flash and the Media buttons. These buttons are no longer need. Which is good news. The sky’s the limit on what we can now embed. The embedding process is now even easier, but with a quark.

Sue Waters, The Edublogger, provides step-by-step directions for embedding flash or media in an Edublogs’ post. An important tip she shared recommends pasting the embed code as the last step before publishing. Clicking Save and Continue Editing button may break the code and cause your embed not to display. Embed then publish, embed then publish, embed then publish. Got it?

tag: k12, edtech, blogging, Edublogs, embedding, flash, media, Sue Water, The Edublogger

Here’s the latest video from the Commoncraft show by Lee and Sachi LeFever.

tag: k12, edtech, podcasts, podcasting, commoncraft, video, Lee and Sachi LeFever

My daughter brought home a “foldable” filled with notes on mathematical thinkers, perfect content for a Photostory slideshow. I put her to work, assisting me in preparing for my first Digital Storytelling workshop.

Download Mathematical Thinkers

We found Photostory, free software from Microsoft, very easy to use. The program leads you through the steps of creating a digital story. Recording a separate audio file for each slide worked great. Customizing the motion and adding text was easy. The provided music options are a great time saver for those not wanting to find and import music. If you can’t find any tunes to your liking, you can import you own music. The trickest part was creating title and credits slides, since the program doesn’t provide options for creating such a slide. We used PowerPoint to create a credit slide, saving it as a jpg. We then imported this jpg into Photostory, just like we did all the other images.

We uploaded the production to Archive.org, because it is free and not blocked by the school’s filter. Then I used the Embed Media button in Edublogs to embed the production in this blog post. If you intend to embed the production in a blog post, be sure to click the Settings button during the Save Your Story step of Photostory, and choose “Profile for computer -1 (320×240).” The default setting is too large.

tag: edtech, k12, Photostory, PowerPoint, Digital Storytelling, Archive.org, math

I shot this video with an Ultra Flip Video camcorder. I’ve been considering this tool for classroom use. It is not much bigger than my cell phone. Thus I was able to carry it in my pocket and easily use it while riding a horse.The simplicity of the tool is one of the things I love the most. It can record up to 60 minutes of video (640×480), no tapes or cards involved. It’s like a big flash drive with a lens. It runs on batteries, no charging before use. The back of the camera has a display screen and 3 buttons: play, delete, and a rocker switch. The rocker switch as a red button in the middle to start/stop recording. The sides of the switch control zoom, volume, and selecting a clip for playback. The zoom (2x digital) is minimal, but I don’t see that as an issue when considering how this camera could be used in the classroom.

There is a tripod mount on the bottom and a TV output port on the side (cables were included). The USB arm flips out to easily transfer the videos to your computer as an avi file. It has software that automatically appears when you connect the camera to your computer, which requires a few minutes to install upon first use. It includes a simple menu for downloading and organizing flip videos on your computer, sharing them by email or YouTube, and capturing still images from a clip. The quality of the video and the audio would meet classroom needs, and provide a good file size for editing and sharing.

No cables for transferring the video, no adapter for charging, no tapes or cards to keep track of, no software CDs to install. Simple. Easy to use. Inexpensive. I found it on Amazon for $150.

Willard Staff: Who wants to try it? Send me an email and I’ll deliver it to your classroom.

If you have used a Flip Video camcorder in the classroom I’d like to hear your comments.

tag: edtech, k12, Ultra Flip Video, camcorder, video

Flickr now allows Pro users to upload videos, up to 90 seconds in length, smaller than 150MB in size. The video upload process is the same as the photo upload process. Just like images, videos can be set to private or public. A public video can be viewed by anyone, Flickr member or not. After the upload was complete and it was processed, the video was available for viewing within a few minutes.

The embedding options allow me to set the video player size and display video title and author at start. The player is very basic, but does offer full screen. When I preview this post with the embedded video, I’ve noticed the player is not properly positioned in my post, but off to the right, rearranging my entire blog. I tried changing the player size, but this didn’t correct the problem. Maybe when I click the Publish button it will magically move over. I’ve tried using the Flash button to embed the video, instead of just pasting in the provided code. But this hasn’t worked either. It did work when I published the post directly from Flickr, as you can see in the next post. Thus I tried copying the embedding code from that post into this one. Didn’t work. Once I edited the post from Flickr, using my Edublogs dashboard, the video issue appeared in that post as well.

Conclusions: To post a video from Flickr into an Edublogs post, use the “Blog this” feature in Flickr. Do not edit this Flickr published post from within Edublogs.

Please see the next post to view the video.

I apologize to my subscribers for clogging your reader with several editions of this single post.

tag: edtech, Flickr, k12, video