In last month's TMD class, I did some poking around on Vimeo.com®, and found that it is a nice alternative to the ad-littered landscape of Youtube®. This past week, I discussed using Vimeo with my classes and we agreed that creating a class Vimeo page was a neat idea.
I hope to add many student videos to the webpage in the near future. However, there are some privacy issues that we need to address before it can come to fruition. Through my thorough research of Vimeo as a Web 2.0 tool, I am convinced that it will be a worthwhile crusade.
As Vimeo is more geared toward original content (and not cluttered with copyrighted material, music videos and TV shows like Youtube), it is the perfect fir for use in the classroom. There is a 500mb per week size limit that is imposed on free accounts, but with proper video compression this is not really a huge issue. With a paid account though, there is no "cue" for uploading material to the site, it appears right away. If the budget allows, I may look into a paid account, which will also increase the size limitations we are bound to. With the paid account, we can actually ad HD videos and are not restricted to the ten minute limit that Youtube has.
In 2009, a blogger on BrightHub.com named "PapaJohn", said that "I fear that sharing the link to www.vimeo.com will add pressure on them to handle more uploads and possibly, maybe not today, become so successful that they’ll also need to scale back the service. The website and those who run it have all the hallmarks of high quality." Luckily, the scaling back he mentioned hasn't happened. in fact, since then the service has gotten better, upping the free upload limit from 250mb per week to 500mb.
Vimeo's ease of use is great for students. It literally took me one minute to create an account. I had our first video uploaded within three minutes. You can find our class Vimeo page at:
http://www.vimeo.com/hhstv
I'm excited to really begin adding student-created videos so we can begin sharing our work with the families, friends and other teachers of our students.
References
PapaJohn. (2009, August 7). Free online video hosts... Vimeo [Online forum message]. Retrieved from http://www.brighthub.com/multimedia/video/articles/1409.aspx
I'm a huge fan of vimeo and still surprised it hasn't gotten more attention than it has. It is a much cleaner, efficient solution than YouTube. It also has some nice features around security that could lend itself well to some of the needs specific to a K12 classroom. I know often times there are concerns around publishing videos with young students to the web, and vimeo's paid service has solutions around password protection and other viewing restrictions that could make a lot of sense. Hopefully you'll help get the secret out!
ReplyDeleteYou will upload your final projects to our Viddler account. As you research, this would be an option for comparison. Viddler allows you to comment right on your student videos for grading or critiquing purposes. Great post, Erik.
ReplyDeleteI am aware of Viddler, and I liked the video feedback possibilities. They definitely both have their plus and minus traits...
ReplyDelete