Whilst having a tidy up- much overdue as always- I found my outdoor camera that I’d purchased from TTS a while ago. Inspired by Springwatch I decided to put some fresh batteries in and crank it up again. There is a bit of hit and miss about setting it up at the right distance, but no closer than a metre seems to work. Closer than that and it loses focus. It can take images and videos at various quality levels and time intervals. It also has a time-lapse facility, but I’ve yet to explore that. I put mine on a tripod, but there you can strap it to trees, poles, etc.
I downloaded the images and videos to my computer and went to pop a selection onto this blog but they all exceeded the file size limit. Shrinking images isn’t too tricky, but doing the same for videos seemed to involve a bit more work uploading to a site and then downloading a compressed version. It could be done, but in a moment of remembering something useful it struck me that J2E has the facility to upload videos. Therefore I could pop the media on my J2E account, use them in J2E5 and blog them on J2Webby and link to that. So that’s what I did. Partly for convenience and partly to show what can be done with J2E beyond writing and inserting images. The upload went smoothly, but I did find it best to upload one video at a time and once done and converted they were ready to use either in a J2E page or to link to directly. And of course, once they’re in My Files in J2E I then have the option of sharing those files with pupils to use or for me to pop them in a shared document for them to work on. All done very simply but effectively.
So, this was done with the local wildlife as a focus, but it could just have easily been videos or images of models pupils have made, a practical science experiment, some D&T or a PE activity. I reckon there are lots of videos sat on many a device that never make it off to a wider audience. Well, if you are a J2E subscriber, this is one way of making your subscription even better value and if you’re not, there are other ways of achieving a similar result. I use SmugMug as a backup for my photos and some videos as it’s reasonably priced and I don’t sign over the rights to my photos unlike some other online storage services, but as ever, other options are available.
I know there are many schools that have wildlife areas. Wouldn’t it be good to have some photos and videos of your residents?
