From video trials to the real deal: getting the public service to Hollywood

Hillside Special School teacher David Noble is one of my favourite listens each week, Booruch being an educational professional development podcast you just can't afford to miss. Even if, like me, you're a few weeks out of date by the time you find a train journey to catch up.

Booruch's Education Podcast Reflections No. 46 highlights some of the new developments at Learning and Teaching Scotland, in Connected Live, the online side-serving of award-winning Connected Magazine. Interestingly, David had found our old YouTube clips before the print magazine that been sent out with a DVDRom on the front cover last summer.

Good news is, this is what we call a transition period (i.e. just playing about). We now have a burgeoning Blip.TV channel, which is hopefully somewhat more accessible than YouTube and whose latest videos get plenty of comments. We still need to iron a few glitches out before anyone will be prepared to make this a mainstream, marketed, higher profile project, but we also need more talented bloggers to share their posts, their thoughts and takes on the world of the classroom. Send your (virtual) postcards to me...

As David points out, the video revolution has taken hold at LTS, with Learning about Learning and Journey To Excellence featuring some world class speakers and thought-leaders speaking - for free - about their thoughts on where we could go.

It's not quite YouTube, but using our own LTS flash video player. Hopefully, given that our content is likely to be relevant to educationalists, any LTS video player video will be free to access within school. The flash player still needs some development to make it embeddable in your blogs but at least it's viewable, providing fly-on-the-wall potential for watching other professionals at work. Soon, I hope to be able to add videos to our Connected Live podcast feed.

I guess one of the things that's not exactly pushing the embeddability of the LTS Video Player for your blogs and websites is that, with the BlipTV channel, we've seen relatively few embeds elsewhere on the web. I wonder why that is? Is the content just not of interest to other bloggers?

What kind of video is most useful to people, though? Are we getting it (almost) right? I'm still keen on keeping video really short, really punchy, offering access to people and objects most of us just can't get on a regular basis. Should we carry on down this route, or just concentrate on more text blogging and website content?

Comments

[John]

Hi Ewan,
My podcast listening is sporadic, but Booruch is a must listen for me too.
Short and punchy would do it for me, I never seem to have the time to watch long videos.
The idea of lts hosting rather than using youtube is essential for me as many local authorities still block a ton of social web content.
I wonder if copyright would allow LTS to download and host some of the great stuff already on youtube to make it available in school. Eg Information R/evolution or Scratch tutorials etc?

Should not be too hard to make lts video embed-able in other blogs, I'll look forward to it. (and I am going to try and make our sandaig video flash player embed-able as a wee holiday project;-))

[Ewan McIntosh]

Excellent idea, provided all the material is copyright traceable or genuinely GNU. I'll have a poke around and then we could maybe draw up a shopping list wiki?

[John]

There is certainly a fair bit of creative commons stuff out there. A wiki would be a great idea, I'd be happy to spend a wee bit of time trawling youtube etc.

[Andrew Brown]

A wiki would be a great idea - that way we could all chip in the good stuff we find?