As part of my blog server solution I was not merely content to stop at the provisioningbof blogs to my pupils.  As part of our curriculum for excellence roadmap we have tried to bring video editing into the heart of the curriculum.  But taking and editing videos with pupils is fraught with issues; first you need sufficient hardware for large groups of pupils to use, so I bought as many flip cameras as I could, next with PCs on the networked policed  to the hilt to prevent network abuse (and rightly so) how do you provide users with local storage to allow users to store and edit this data without the need to send it the length and breadth of the network and kill your network servers with high bandwidth traffic?  Well my solution here was purchase a large number of 4Gb USB pen drives (chi-Ching, yet more money) which would allow users to save their work and edit the videos on.

Now next we need suitable video editing software, well I’m still working on that.  I’m trying to buy licences for Adobe Premiere Elements for the Faculty but at the moment we simply have to make do with movie maker.  Although this is already proving limiting for our needs as we start to push the boundaries of our aspirations.

Lastly, we come back to the blog server, I’d like to embed the pupils work in their blogs but WordPress doesn’t come with a video player, I can’t use YouTube as the pupils are filtered from it because of the uncontrollable types of content that they may choose to happen upon whilst visiting the site and this left me looking to supplement the WordPress element of the blowsy server with my own YouTube clone.

This has been quite a battle and forms the next part of the story of my blog server.  All I’ll say here is that I’ve tried both PHPmotion and Clip bucket and I’ll discuss them next.