Once you produce some media resources, you have to figure out what you are going to do with it. Some things to consider are backups, file sizes, access to the files, Web-based storage, and whether or not you are going to share and allow others to remix and reuse your work. These are questions for both you and your students.
Media files, just like any other important files you create on your computer, require some kind of backup strategy. The thing is with media files, especially video, high-resolution images, and PowerPoint or Keynote presentations, is that they are large files. External high capacity hard drives are relatively inexpensive and provide a good safe means of storing backups, as long as you remember to do it or configure your software to do the backup automatically. Your institution may provide you will disk space on it’s server, which is also backed-up. If you upload files to the Internet to sites such as Flickr, TeacherTube or SlideShare, always keep a local copy of the items and back them up yourself.
There are now many options for storing and sharing your resources online, and many provide a significant amount of disk space for free with an option to purchase more on a monthly basis if need be. Think about the advantages and disadvantages of storing your files on the Web or the “cloud.” If you are a podcaster, a couple of easy ways to publish your podcasts are including them in a blog post and uploading them to a service such as iTunes.
Many teachers are using some kind of online environment, or even multiple environments to support their classes. Moodle is a popular open source course environment that many teachers are using, while others are opting for a more open delivery using blogs and wikis. Whatever the case, if you want to include multimedia (especially video) in your teaching, you will have to decide between uploading the files to the environment and uploading the files to another Web-based service and using the embed code to display the resource. Each option has its advantages and disadvantages.
You might even want to register your own domain like greatestteacheronearth.net. For a monthly fee on sites like Canadian Webhosting or Bluehost (USA), you will get lots of storage space and the ability to easily install and customize a variety of software such as WordPress for blogging, TidyWiki for collaboration, and a photo gallery to share your photos. You can start building your own personal cyberinfrastructure.
Gardner Campbell talks about three recursive practices:
- Narrating: Maybe you should be telling others about your experiments in using multimedia. You can describe what you have done in detail so others can duplicate or write about what has and hasn’t worked for you and yours students. A good place to do this is in a blog.
- Curating: “How do you take care of your stuff?” How do you arrange your resources so you and others can find them?
- Sharing: Allows you to connect with others—you taking from them and visa versa.
Check out Gardner Campbell’s presentation at the Open Education Conference in Vancouver, August, 2009. (Approximately 45 minutes.)
No Digital Facelifts: Thinking the Unthinkable About Open Educational Experiences
When you create resources, whether it be a lesson, a photograph, or a digital story, you will need to decide if you are going to share it with others or not. There are now over 100 million photographs on Flickr that have been licensed at some level of Creative Commons. The same is true for many sites where teachers are uploading their resources such as iTunes University, UStream, SlideShare and TeacherTube. Many of these sites will allow you to pick a Creative Commons license if you decide to share your work. Sharing through Creative Commons does not mean you are giving away your intellectual property, it just means you are willing to share with others.
Other Resources:
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