Saturday, June 27, 2009

I am attending the DEN Leadership Council Symposium in Silver Spring, MD and a 4th birthday, pre-NECC "Day at Discovery School" event as well. One of the great presentations was "What's New in Discovery" illustrating the new, updated site for Discovery Educators and Discovery Streaming. One incredible facet of the site is MediaShare which is open to all members of the DEN. DEN members can explore and store the files/lessons that have been uploaded but only STAR DEN members can upload to the site and DEN STARS have the most options (hint - another GREAT reason to become a DEN STAR) as Media Share allows multiple uploads/types and converts all video to Flash. Read on for more info!


Steve Dembo, of the Discovery Educator Network, shared with us that MediaShare is a media management server marketed to school districts in order to aggregate/upload/store materials in one place. This product evolved from Discovery Education's need to contain info in one place. All DEN members can get into/download materials, but only STARS have full upload access. Under a single asset, you can place as many files/resources as you want (read - the beauty of MediaShare) visible to all in the DEN. You also have options to share with with the DEN and your District (either-or/both) + the “national audience”;

Media Share does have a limit for files up to 100mb per file. You can upload as many as ten (you saw it, 10!) 100mb files! When you are finished with creating a MediaShare resource, even if you do not click “done,” your uploads are still there. The resource is created and is in “search”; you can find it by going back to your resources.

MediaShare will accept embeddable code in the “description” box; so instead of uploading a file, go to a VoiceThread for the embed and paste in the description box. When you put the code in “description,” it “resolves” and becomes the end product of embeddable code. The beauty of MediaShare is that you can upload multiple media into the description via embeddable code, including a ustream.tv box so that the next time you did the presentation, you could have the live feed as a resource in real time. MS is a very flexible system: but remember to always check “check to allow embedding/direct linking” if you want to share your upload outside MediaShare.

No comments: