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There are many web 2.0 tools that promote learning. Screencast is one such tool. The
ease with which one can enhance their blogs with ScreenCast will put ScreenCast at the
top of any students list. Today, I will demonstrate how to embed videos you've uploaded to ScreenCast
into your personal or professional blogs so you can enhance the way you present your information.
So the first thing you need to do is go to ScreenCast.com and set up your account. Once
you've entered your information and set up an account with ScreenCast, you simply want
to login. When the login process is complete, you'll be taken to this page where you can
upload your content. You also have other options where you can create a folder for the videos
you that upload, you can create a playlist or you can move your content from folder to
folder. For our purposes today we simply want to upload content. No before we upload, you
can see we've been taken to a quick pop up that shows that there is a 100 Megabyte cap
on the files that you upload in one particular upload setting. 100 Megabytes will be more
than enough for one file project that you have.
Next click on browser. When you click on browser, you'll be taken to a place on your hard drive
where you select the video that you want to upload. For our purposes today, click on libraries,
videos which has all the different videos I have loaded onto this particular computer
and I will upload an educational video today. Now, next I click the open button the file
will automatically automatically begin to open to Screencast. The upload time depending
on one's bandwidth will take anywhere from a couple seconds up to a minute. While the
file is uploading, there are a few points worth remembering. With Screencast, you can
upload all your images, videos, and documents to Screencast and then decide how and with
whom you want to share your content. With Screencast you can display your information
in virtually any format, you control the rights to your own content, and you get to keep the
original quality of what you've uploaded. Many times with other sites, you upload your
content and they have a one-size-fits-all policy that chances how your are able to view
what you've uploaded. With Screencast, what you've uploaded stays exactly in the same
format, which is a real plus. With Screencast, its important to remember you get 2 free Gigs
of Upload before you have to pay, unlike Slideshare that requires payment for any video upload.
Now once the upload process is complete, you click close and you can see that we successfully
uploaded the video to Screencast. Once we click on the arrow, we are taken to where
we have several options. Attachments can be uploaded, details provided a frame by frame
view, with email one is able to provide email addresses for those you invite to ScreenCast
to view your content on the website, or you can simply click on the share button which
will give you the code that you need to embed on the blog.
Now here you'll notice before you capture the code that the content content width is
set at 640 which is too wide for the formatting of an average blog. You want to change this
to 500 which will automatically adjust the height to its correct format. Once you've
made that change, you will want to capture the code, once you've completed that, go to
the blog site, click new post, then paste your code. You'll notice that the width was
changed to 500 which will make it fit into the right formatting. Now before we post or
publish this we will need a title for the video. For today's lesson we will call this
post Screencast Distance Learning Lesson. We should be all set. Now you can either preview
it or feeling comfortable, we'll go ahead and hit the publish button. Once we hit the
publish button it. Now, again, it may take a few moments depending on your bandwidth,
but right off the bat we can see that this ScreenCast Distance Learning Lesson successfully
uploaded to the blog. Then I'll hit the play button and in so doing we can see that it
was successfully uploaded with the imagery and with the video that I won't play for our
purposes, but you can see that the video is there and ready for viewing.
Whether you're a teacher or a student, or whether you want to share video content personally
or professionally, knowing how to embed videos into your blog will enhance your visual performance
and Screencast is the Web 2.0 tool that will help you get there.