PE4_Viddler

Image courtesy of MS Office Clip Art

After recovering from my “deer in headlights” feelings of amazement and wonder at the abundance of Web 2.0 tools that are currently available, reality set in as I struggled to find one that was going to fit my needs. At first I was simply overwhelmed by the options and found myself spending precious hours checking out link after link on sites like Go2Web2.0, and Web 2.0 Guru. Each link had potential but none seemed totally feasible for the project I had in mind. I thought about utilizing either Popplet for a group planning project, or simply grabbing challenges from InterroBang, but again these didn’t quite fit with the content I needed to address.

Since the project that I wanted my students to undertake was to create a photo podcast in GarageBand I decided that I should try to find an online collaborative photostory-type application. Basically I was hoping to find a site that would allow various users to upload pictures to a common timeline and then add music and voiceover recording to the pictures. I ran across a couple options but none had all the components that I needed, namely the collaborative features, voice recording capabilites, and free use. For example Animoto is a slick site that turns your images into dynamic animated movies and sets them to music but does not allow precision voice recording as it sounds like their movies are assembled via some sort of algorithm. 

Sliderocket is a cloud based enterprise presentation solution that allows for the creation of dynamic slide presentations that can include real time RSS feeds and other social media. Multiple users from different locations can work these presentations simultaneously and everything gets updated via the cloud. Very Cool! This would have been perfect except that the free version did not include any voice or multimedia capabilites. 

VuVox was another slick site that allows you to create multimedia collages that can be scrolled through like a timeline. Unfortunately this one was blocked by my school’s web filtering, and I didn’t have the time this week to take up this battle. 

Finally there was JayCut which looks like it will be pretty cutting edge, but it is either not yet live or it was recently acquired my RIM to be included in future Blackberry Smart phones (gotta keep up with the iPhone somehow) so was none the less unavailable.

So I decided to go back to using GarageBand for the podcast, and that I would try to address an online posting solution that would allow my students to provide feedback on each other’s work. This is something that I have struggled with since I began teaching. My first year I knew I needed to get stuff online, but as it was my first year teaching, this quickly fell to the bottom of my list of priorities. My second year I created a iWeb page for my classes and began posting student work here. Unfortunately my administrators, due to the “public display of students faces” issue, shut this down a year later. I started using Schooltube but found this to be cumbersome and extremely difficult to manage (I still don’t know how to delete content from my own channel). So after all of this I decided to fall back on the familiar once again and utilize the video hosting site introduced in the EMDT program, Viddler.

The free version of Viddler has some limitations, such as the weekly 2GB upload/download limit, but I decided that I might just be able to make it under the limit, especially since we are only using GarageBand on this first project. On the plus side Viddler has very simple and straight forward video management capabilities that make organization a breeze. 

So I set up a new account specifically for my classrooms, and created groups for each classes’ work. To resolve the privacy dilemma, I will be making all the videos private, viewable only by the “MrShup” user, but providing all my students with this login information. Hopefully this will create enough of a restricted access situation to diminish the privacy concerns. Unfortunately this also has downside. When all students log in as “MrShup” all their comments show up as “MrShup.” To resolve this I plan to require all my students to simply include their names in their posts.

So after a long week of exploration I haven’t ended up going too far from what I know, but I think it is the right decision. Tune back in in a week or so for an update on how it all pans out.