Those of you who have been following along, or have been affected by, the issues we’ve been having with tv.hwdsb.on.ca know that we are updating the system to rectify the issues we’ve run into. After a year of toiling away at trying to get the system up and running, only to have it go down a few months later, without the sense of urgency we had hoped to see from the vendor in repairing the damage, this update gives us an opportunity to re-imagine the space.
When we initially created the space, we created categories based on curriculum subjects, and separated those compartments by Elementary and Secondary. We created a Professional category that we jammed full of instructional videos on all of the different tools available in the board.
Looking back, I’m not sure if that was the best way to go about this.
I imagine that a number of the videos our students create cross curriculum lines. I imagine that users probably avoided posting 
videos in the Professional category because it looked as if the 21CL team has marked that territory as their own.
I’m not usually one to go out on my blog to reach out for this kind of help. I’m not sure why, but I tend to use this more as an “essay” space, rather than a space to request help. I was a few characters into a tweet on the subject, thinking I could reach out on that forum for advice, but quickly realized that not only would I have difficulty fitting my question into 140 characters, but it would be difficult for people to respond.
So I ask here: If you were setting up a video platform — a “YouTube” for a K12 user group — what channel categories would you offer up? As a teacher, if you were sharing video with others, what categories would you like to see (you can always tag things, but categories provide a means for more formal, concrete collections of elements)? Those of you who use video platforms that offer up categories or channels or collections, have you seen any spaces that you think are doing it right?
I love that your school board is setting this up – what a great resource! I like your original setup. It sounds logical for anyone to follow. I think most kids (and probably adults!) would search like they do on Google, so a way to type something like ‘how to find equivalent fractions’ and have relevant video appear would be great if you don’t have that already. Will people outside your board be able to access this?
Currently a large number of the videos are public. Users have the option of making their videos available to registered users (anyone with an HWDSB username) or to the public. Additionally we integrate with D2L, which allows us to provide a gallery of videos that only the students within a particular class can see.
Search really depends on the uploader to tag their videos appropriately with all of the search terms they think someone might use to find their video. This is something we work on in the blogging sphere as well.
Thanks for the thoughts.
Forgot to follow the comments in my post. Sorry for the additional post!
No worries.