Category Archives: Storage

More digital storage

ePortfolios, Storage,

My earlier praises of divShare have lost their shine due to the ongoing frustration of pop-up adds. Simple enough to block, especially using a browser like Firefox, but no user should have to worry about them, especially students focused on their learning. So instead I have begun using Vimeo, a fast and sleek video sharing site with a little social networking thrown in for good luck.

I can upload mov and m4v files which is perfect for a Mac user and upload up to 500MB per week including HD movies. The quality and speed is excellent and the interface user friendly. Additionally I can embed movies in any ePortfolio using the excellent Video Embedder plug-in.

At this stage, highly recommended.

#online #Storage #video

divShare for Video Storage

Storage

I have begun trialling divShare for the online storage and sharing of video content. The screencast How to movies on this site are now stored on DivShare. A simply and straightforward process although embedding the flash movies within this site is proving difficult. The link to the movie is perfectly adequate at this stage and works seemlessly.

Online Storage

ePortfolios, Storage, , ,

Dr Helen Barrett has been discussing different options for online storage on her E-Portfolios for Learning blog. Online space and storage capacity is crucial for the success of web-based ePortfolios. With media rich content disk space can quickly build up. In fact last year our students portfolios were averaging at 100MB for each user. When you are not hosting the sites yourself, the cost of your web space is difficult to meet (thankfully the great team at InSPire Net have helped us out for this project!).

This of course is where the online storage becomes the ideal solution to the problem. Storing all of your content on another web host and either streaming video, displaying image galleries or audio to your own blog solves the issue.

One service that looks extremely promising is

divShare where a free account gives you 5GB of online storage for your video, audio, images and documents. Once uploaded you can embed or link to any of this content from your ePortfolio. 5GB for free! That’s ample for a whole class of students.

Another great advantage of this is that your content is completely private until you share it with others. Unlike You Tube, which does not allow you to embed private videos, you can with divShare.

One minor disadvantage is that currently the service only allows the conversion of AVI, WMV, MOV, MPG and ASF files for converting to FLV for embedding into sites. With 100% of our content being created on Macs the default formats for sharing content (m4a and m4v) don’t seem to be made embeddable. More time need for playing perhaps…

divShare is only the tip of the iceberg, there are many more options out there. Check out Dr Helen Barrett’s blog for a full breakdown.

#embed #ePortfolios #onlinestorage #video