The online Collaborative Projects described below are all sponsored by JenuineTech. These projects are well organized, provide lots of classroom activity options, and are fun for the students. Jennifer Wagner, the person behind JenuineTech, has been facilitating these award winning projects for years and is very experienced.
Classes will capture a monthly picture of the view from a classroom window, documenting how the scenery changes. Students will write descriptions of what they see change and share with other classrooms their observations.
Technology Objective: Teachers and students will learn to upload to an online arena to showcase their work.
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.
During Spring Break, my family traveled to Dallas, Texas to visit my husband’s sister and her family. We enjoyed touring the city’s World Aquarium. My daughter’s “assignment” was to select one animal from the aquarium to bring home to Missouri. She had to choose an animal based on its ability to survive in our habitat, as opposed to one she liked. No, the animals aren’t available for checkout. I was just once again using her as a guinea pig while preparing for my first digital storytelling workshop. Another part of her inquiry lesson was to collect video footage and provide narration. Below is our first digital story. Click the big triangle play button to stream the video, or right-click on the Download link and choose “Save target as” or “Save link as” to download the video.
The technicalities: Using Windows Movie Maker, we captured and cut the video. Then imported some images from our digital camera, and a few downloaded public domain images. After recording the narration, I added in some creative commons licensed music. The title and transition features polished off the project. Then I saved the project as “video for broadband (340 kbps)” in a Windows Media Video (wmv) format. I uploaded the wmv file to archive.org, where it was automatically converted into other formats and various file sizes (flash, mpeg4). I chose archive.org because it is free, and not blocked by our District’s filter. The flash version was the fastest to load, but too blocky for my daughter’s standards. The wmv file is the best quality, but a large file (better to download and not stream). It is the one I used for this blog post. But I’m guessing since this is a wmv file, it won’t play on all computers. Next we will publish a Voicethread version, and a then Photostory version. Please leave your recommendations, comments, or suggestions.
Willard Staff: This YouTube video will be blocked at school, but you can watch it elsewhere.
Twitter is difficult to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced it. This commoncraft video paints a good picture. I’ve found Twitter to be a great tool for connecting with other edtech people. I don’t use it to share my everyday activities, as much as to exchange resources, and as an immediate support system when I need something.
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general, video | Tagged: collaborative projects, Hats Off to Lincln, JenuineTech, OREO, Room with a View | 
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Posted by Janetta Garton
