Vlogin

In this day and age it makes sense to have animation students submitting their work digitally, but at Southbank I have been having trouble settling on a system for this.

Having a common folder people can put files in leaves you vulnerable to people deleting or moving files that affect others grades (isn't that right Hong?). The online system Southbank subscribes to (Blackboard) is what I've used for the last few years, but come marking time I find its interface to be cumbersome and time consuming, in the grade book you have to click through about four pages to download one submitted file and start all over to see the next thing that student has submitted.

What I want is one central location where I can view all the work that a particular student has done, I want to be able to scroll over a summary of the submitted work and then view items in more detail if I choose with a minimum of fuss. Could it be that the answer has been right under my nose all along?

I think that next year I'm going to get each of my students to set up a Blogger blog, if students have concerns about privacy then you have an option in the settings to make it a private blog that only invited people can read. Also I found this cool site that shows you how to embed AVI or Quicktime files in your blog (no more grainy flash videos). To do this they are linking to another cool site called Blip.tv, its kind of like flicker for video, they have video there with Creative Commons licenses so you can use it in your own work. Cool!