vlog frustrations

I have managed to successfully post video on both Blogger and WordPress, but not without pulling out a lot of hair. In my Assignment 3 group, we tried to embed a bit of video we took with my basic digital camera into a wiki. Unfortunately, Wikispaces won’t allow you to upload form your computer. You must use clips from YouTube or GoogleVideo. We didn’t want our videos in cyberspace, so we tried other options. Michelle made a blog on Blogger and I spent hours uploading a few clips at home. But it worked.

Today I edited an earlier post on my WordPress teacher blog, which I am trying out as an alternative to Blogger. I like WordPress better for their widgets, tags, categories, and pages. If you host your blog on another server you can have your own domain name and use fancy and free plugins. Anyway, another discovery I made yesterday was that my Macbook not only takes photos, but also shoots video using PhotoBooth. Cool! I was excited to no longer have to upload clips from my camera. I could skip a step.

But then I tried to post the video, but couldn’t access PhotoBooth through WordPress. I then tried to export the video to iPhoto. Eventually this worked but I still couldn’t get to it through WordPress. I then exported the video to iMovie and WordPress said it didn’t support that kind of file. Ugh. So I uploaded my clip to GoogleVideo as an unlisted video, meaning it isn’t public (in theory), copy and pasted the URL into WordPress and it was instantly up!

The most important thing I learned this morning was to become very familiar with the applications and technology you are using, and how they work together by creating the kinds of things you want to use with children or colleagues. This first hand knowledge and experience is invaluable to teacher librarians.

wacky, wonderful wikis

For the first assignment I teamed up with Keith Bryce and Michelle Sloboda. We chose this article, which we ironically could not find on the UBC databases, but actually had to find on the shelves in the Education Library:

 Churchill, D. (2007). Web 2.0 and possibilities for educational applications. Educational Technology, 47(2), 24-29.

In order to get some first hand experience at Web 2.0 applications, we decided to create a wiki. This turned out to be a hugely enjoyable experience for me and I hope my fellow group members. Neither of them had created a wiki before and were interested in a blog. I promoted the wiki, because blogs are a lot less collaborative and you can’t organize information the way you can on a wiki. Even though you can tag and categorize your posts (in WordPress), blogs are limited to posts in chronological order.