PortablePD.ca

TeacherTube for Video

Jane and I played around with TeacherTube a couple of years back.  Think of it as YouTube for educators.  We uploaded a couple of videos there, nothing fancy (We used the tempermental, not-so-school-friendly Windows Movie Maker, but that’ll be another post).  I put up a video of a student teacher demonstrating the famous Pepsi/Mentos reaction, a video of some guys traveling the world in a biodeisel firetruck and another video of Leo Brooks working with students on hand drumming.  To my astonishment, my video showing what happens when you mix Mentos and Pepsi has since been viewed over 5000 times. So, I kept digging and checked out Jane’s stats.  Not that we’re competitive or anything…

Jane, always the master educator, made a  couple of videos of students teaching the science of elastic and potential energy (The Comeback Can and the Wind Up Tractor).  Typically, she left me in the dust.  As of this posting, her video, “The Comeback Can” has been viewed over 8981 times.  Not quite viral, but pretty good for a grade 5 science lesson out in the portables.

One of the cons of TeacherTube is the advertising.  I’ve only encountered education related ads, but I still prefer to steer students away from them.  However, embedding these videos in your own blog helps reduce wandering minds.

TeacherTube gives you the necessary code to embed videos into your blog.  Here’s my exploding Pepsi video:

And Jane’s comeback can:

TeacherTube for Audio

It turns out that TeacherTube now hosts MP3 files as well.  For me, this is a big deal.  Jane and I have been on the search for an easy-to-use, free, unlimited storage space solution for our podcasts.  We now have three seasons worth of Portable Radio and one season of Portable PD and are reluctant to take any of it down.  TeacherTube appears to fit all of our needs – even the one about unlimited storage space.  So, fingers crossed, I’ll experiment with uploading our next podcast there.

TeacherTube even gives you the code to embed the audio in your blog.  A nice feature since Edublogs (the provider of this blog) no longer generates a player for audio. Here’s our latest podcast:

Frequent visitors to PortablePD.ca will be familiar with our screencasts.  Screencasts are movies of your desktop and come in handy when explaining how to deal with software and websites.  Jing offers free and very easy to use software for creating such movies.

Until recently, we weren’t able to embed these screencasts directly into our blog.  Instead we would have create a link to another website.  Being self-centred types, Jane and I much prefer to keep our readers on our site at all times!

Predictably enough, I’ve created this screencast explaining how to embed it into a post.

Click here to see a larger version (or right click to download it).

This post has been written on “Using tools like VoiceThread, Voki, mystudiyo, Animoto, SlideShows, Google Documents with students and embedding in blogs posts” as part of The Edublogger’s Birthday Celebration Competition.

This post won!

We recently received a question about how to embed Google calendars into your blog.  Here’s a screencast showing how to do just that, at least if you are using Edublogs.

Click here to see a larger version.

If you would prefer to learn how to embed by reading – check out this How To Embed a Google Calendar in a Blog Page! (Thanks Sue Waters for the link).