So, we've all done the blog thing (or the wiki-thing) but, to fully exploit this as a teaching tool, some of us may want to go beyond the basics of using a blog to to type entries. Especially if one wants to reproduce a sort of scrap book like this assignment in their own class, they may want their students to embed other media into their blog. Blogger has a built in method for embedding images and videos but other media prove rather difficult. I recently started a blog for my personal writings which I wanted to attach as PDFs. No luck. Eventually, I uploaded the PDF to my google docs account and then programmed a link to this and then I had to adjust my privacy settings so readers could view the document from the blog link but not in any other way. The pros of this method: Every one can easily get and some students may already have a google docs account, which it could be used for many other course activities as well, the process is relatively uncomplicated. Cons: Minimal coding is still required which may be too much for some students, the PDF doesn't look as good in google docs and it would have if it were an openable attachment.
But that was nothing compared to the problems I had trying to put my podcasts up on blogger. Even though blogger lets you attach video and the podcasts play in windows media player, it still would not accept them. What eventually did was upload the podcasts to one of my personal websites, then write code linking from the blog. Pros: it worked. Cons: This method is horribly complicated. Uploading to a free-code website and coding the correct path to link to specific content on such a site are fairly advanced procedures and I had to get my partner to help me. There is pretty much NO way the average student could do this and stay sane. Even if they could, it would certainly distract from the course content. Plus, I'm sure a lot of students don't even have a website to host things on.
So, since then, I've been researching alternate methods of getting audio into a blog. I know, I know, there are literally hundreds of free podcast hosting services. Why did I give myself a huge headache instead of just using one of those? I have this privacy issue about my stuff being displayed out of context—I don't want people listening to my podcasts without reading the blog post to give them context. This may sound weird but it is. Podbean advertises that it has privacy settings but I don't know if you can externally link to them if material is set to private, the way you can with google docs. If you set something to private, I think you need a password to access it, which could get messy, especially if each student has their own account which means you could be juggling 20+ passwords. I also found a site which contains a list of podcast hosting sites which claim to be similar to podbean. If I ever get really serious about using podcasting with students, especially if blogs are also involved, I will consider it a duty to go through everything on this list and find which tool has the best features for education. There isn't an easy solution to this issue, I think. In my searching, I also found several posts on yahoo answers asking about private podcasts and none of the responses were very helpful (the most detailed suggested hosting the podcast from your own website, which is what I did but, as I said, this isn't a great solution for the classroom). The fact that a number of the people asking this kind of question identified themselves as teachers goes to show that I'm not the only one being plagued by this problem. Even if I could find a podcast hosting site that allowed linking to privacy protected uploads, there's still the problem of students potentially having to program the links. As unsatisfying as it may be, I don't have any easy solutions here. However, I can definitely see how being able to imbed different technology tools in blogs could have important educational uses. Other tools that could have similar uses and pitfalls include surveys, prezi presentations, and power point files (though I'm pretty sure at least some of these could be added using the google docs trick).
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