Google Drive Video Sharing by Guest Blogger David W. Malone

Effortless Video Sharing via Google Drive
Guest Post by David W. Malone
Twitter: @dwmalone
Blog: dwmalone.org

Tech Coordinator, K-8 Tech Teacher, EB CUE Board, MS Education: EdTech Leadership, Google Apps Evangelist, iOS Guru, Cloud Obsessed, Father of two girls (3 & 5)
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There are many options available for students and teachers wanting to share video content online. At my school, the tool of preference is Google Drive, previously Google Documents. Uploading and sharing videos within our school's Google Apps for Education domain is effortless and perfectly addresses the privacy concerns of our parents, teachers and administrators.

Uploading a video to Google Drive is simple. Users of Google Apps, are probably already experts at the procedure. This translates into very little additional training. To upload a video file, either click on the upload button within Google Docs/Drive or drag and drop a file or folder from the desktop to the Google Documents List. After the upload is completed, it will take a few minutes for Google’s servers to process and encode the video(s). Uploaded videos will attempt to play in the Flash Video format first, but a mobile-friendly Quicktime version is also created on Google’s servers.


Once videos are within Google Drive, they can be shared just like any other Google Doc. This is the feature I appreciate most about this video solution. The nuanced-control of privacy levels allow sharing with a specific user, group of users, a whole Google Apps domain, anyone with the link or the world at large.


Videos within Google Drive also integrate effortlessly with Google Sites. Including a video within a Google Site is a simple and choosing Insert: Video: Google Docs Video.


When including a Google Docs Video in a Google Site, permissions are extremely important. If a video is set as private or requires a Google Apps log in, parents and non-student visitors cannot view it. Depending on your needs, this may or may not be your intent. Unless the video contains something of a private nature or student’s personal information, I typically choose “Anyone with the link.” This assures anyone visiting the page can see the video, but it’s not searchable.

Teachers looking to quickly create a website of student or class video work, has nothing more to do than place videos in folder within Google Drive, change the privacy settings to anyone with the link and share that link with the desired audience.


There is no need to create an actual web page, open Google Sites or do anything else. The shared folder and associated link create results that are quite functional and stunning. This is an example page of a shared Google Drive folder containing Mother’s Day Podcasts my kindergartners made with the help of my graduating 8th grade class.


Benefits:

• Ease of use, very little training, and deep integration with Google Apps
• No need for another account or separate log in
• Multiple privacy settings within local Google Apps domain and world at large
• Ability to insert videos directly into Google Sites
• Videos automatically encoded in multiple formats including those suitable for mobile devices
• Folders with videos, when shared, create a turnkey web page suitable for sharing

Issues:

• Difficult to embed Google Drive videos outside of Google Sites
• Potential limitation of upload size and Google Drive capacity
• Deleting a video from your Google Drive takes it offline for everyone else

Google Apps for Education's Video Component

Google Video is a good solution for in-district tightly controlled video sharing. One hundred people at a time can be added to upload video, and video can be shared with everyone within the domain, or groups of people within the domain, much like sharing for Google Docs (though more restricted). Video may not be published outside the domain using this service.  For that purpose, signing up for YouTube for Schools would be a good idea. Here's some information about it. To see a school making great use of their YouTube Channel, check out Manor New Tech High School's channel. WOW!

As far as the size limit (stated as 10 GB) on the Google Video account, I have had the pleasure of working with Google's Senior Education Evangelist, Jaime Casap, many times. Jaime says frequently, "If your school can hit that limit, call me. I want to see that." According to Jaime, no school has ever hit that limit.

Here's why: The 10 GB is not counting the size of each video you upload the same way you do on the hard drive of your machine. A single video on your hard drive could easily be 10 GB, but Google is counting an optimized size that is impossible to determine as far as I know. However, some huge universities use Google Video, for example, Arizona State University, and they have not hit this limit. I will step out there and say that I would be utterly shocked if you guys could hit the limit and even more shocked if Google didn't give you more space if you did.

Most likely you're reading this because your district's budget for the expensive video server you want to have to were going to buy has gone away, but the good news is, there are free solutions that may be even better.

Here's a little video that will show you how this all looks in real life:

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