I’ve spent a long time avoiding posting on this site …. not sure why 🙂

Happy to see that edublogs seems to be up and running again, too.

Anyway – I’ve been VERY busy in my new post. We’re about half way through visiting each of the ICT co-ordinators in their own schools and it’s great to be able to help out with school websites. Almost all schools have moved over to Schools-Online and I’ve become comfortable with the set-up.

I was happy to discover that it’s possible to embed files using html codes, and this has meant that I’ve been able to allow staff to access some CPD courses online via the Falkirk VTC staff website. For example, courses on Blogging, Podcasting and Comic Life are all online. I’ve uploaded some ‘How To’ videos on to the site as well.

Last week, however, I learned (while delivering a course!) that it’s not possible to upload more than one photobucket video to schools-online sub pages – each video appeared to upload ok, but when I clicked on the sub-pages during the actual presentation, all we got to see was the first video over and over again 🙁

Luckily, a bit of ‘thinking on my feet’ led to me logging on to my actual photobucket account and we viewed the videos from there …. phew!! I’ve since hosted them at schooltube … things seem to be working fine now 🙂

 I’ve also been experimenting with other ways of showing the videos. Sliderocket, for example, allows you to easily embed videos within an already uploaded powerpoint slideshow. It’s also very easy to resize the uploaded video by just dragging from the corners (the same way as you would with a pic here on edublogs). Hopefully this link to the falkirk vtc site will work to show what I mean (the video is on the second slide – a work in progress).

Click HERE to find out if it works 🙂

I’ve also found that powerpoints hosted at Google Docs can take an age to load in some schools. A better option seems to be Calameo. Check it out below. It’s also possible to upload and share large pdf files. I tried it out with my 98 page dissertation and it showed up fine at work … unlike scribd which, like Go-Animate, can be hit or miss (dreaded bandwidth issues?).

I’ll do the usual edublogs thing to embed html codes … just have to press ‘publish’ and can’t check it works before I do that so fingers crossed. Let me know what you think of calameo (if it works) – check out the option features as shown in the image below, too!

 

 Didn’t work 🙁

I’ll try again!