Friday, September 21, 2007

My Morning in Doha and Online Tools

I have just 'wasted' a couple of hours playing around with Web 2.0 tools and organising data online and offline.

It started with a quick browse of some blogs this morning and it has led to this blog post to share my explorations. Having moved schools and countries I am still a little disorganised with data. I have backups on hard drives and DVDs (some of the latter were lost in our shipping disaster!) and I have a lot of material online. When I tried to find some of my videos to play with the YouTube custom player I went into a mild spin. I have videos uploaded to blip.tv, Google video and YouTube and TeacherTube....why do I have so many options? So, when I come to consolidate some strands and thoughts I have found the collection to be disjointed and unworkable. Will have to think about this some more. I wanted to collect all my Bangladesh videos together in a playlist so had to upload 'The Day Begins in Dhaka' video again to YouTube (it was on blip only) to join with the others. Once I found it (!) on a hard drive I then had to choose the version I wanted online which meant watching 3 different videos (a few tears of nostalgia for the old life...).

Meanwhile working spouse at his desk has spent a few precious hours setting up a complete Skype system for us to communicate with the family in Australia. These in and out calls with Skype are amazing...and now that we have good bandwidth here in Qatar we can take full advantage of this! no more expensive phone calls I hope. Next thing I know, after sending all details to family re calling a local number and getting through to our Skype here, my father is calling! He is 78 years old and quite computer savvy. We had a good chat and he told me about the new DVD recorder he has bought to record from his HD TV, but it doesn't work yet as they forgot to send the remote and the instructions with it!

Then I started to set up a YouTube custom player. It is such a functional tool! I came across Jennifer Dorman's wonderful blog and wiki full of interesting and useful and well developed Web 2.0 tolls and ideas.

I have been using the Common Craft videos on Web 2.0 tools for staff professional development recently. They are so accessible to the nervous read/write web teachers! The ability to put them all into one embedded video and then onto a blog or wiki is so great!

This one uses almost the same videos as Jennifer. However, Common Craft released a new one this week called Google Docs in Plain English so I included that as well. If you click on Menu you will see the other videos as part of the collection and be able to select what you want.



Here I have combined some videos made in Dhaka while at International School Dhaka. The Podcast Bangladesh and The Day Begins... are mine, however the ISD Memories of Graduation was created my a student, Shaveena, from last year who gave me permission to share it via my YouTube account.



In this example you can see a different option for the embedded video player. I quite like the other one above for preference as viewers can more easily collect the code and video details straight from the viewer.


Using YouTube custom player is easy via your own account. Just remember that you must mark the videos you want to include as favourites first so that you can create playlists and then a custom browser.


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for sharing the video of your drive in Dhaka with us. I love videos like this. Simple, yet so real. It really lets us see what a place we may never be lucky eough in our lifetime to experience is truly like.