This evening I decided to dedicate myself to playing in the sand. I’m messing with web 2.0 tools that I’ve never played with. The first one I’m trying is Sketchcast. I created a sketch of myself playing in the sand. It’s a bit frightening and I didn’t add my voice but you can get the idea. I could see it as a digital storytelling tool with younger students so that they draw the story that they are telling. Fun!

But, now for the difficult part. I wanted to embed the sketch on my blog. I’m now back having the same frustrations as I did trying to embed an Animoto video. Now, after much reading and searching I found the reason. WordPress uses Codex which is a “Function Reference/wp embed register handler” or in lay person’s terms it was designed to make it easier to put media content in your blog. But, the trick is that it has to be a site that it recognizes. No wonder this has been such a nuisance. “The oEmbed implementation in WordPress has discovery disabled. By default, you can only embed from websites that are listed on the internal whitelist. This is to prevent accidental embedding from malicious websites.”

“The easy embedding feature is mostly powered by oEmbed, a protocol for site A (such as your blog) to ask site B (such as YouTube) for the HTML needed to embed content (such as a video) from site B. oEmbed was designed to avoid having to copy and paste HTML from the site hosting the media you wish to embed. It supports videos, images, text, and more.”

Well, I don’t think it’s easier, I think it’s very limiting and makes some of my work impossible. Lesson learned. Check the editing functions of any blogs I use in the future!

Okay, now I’m back at it. Hmmmm….what to try out? Creaza looks interesting. There’s mindmapping, cartooning, video and audio editing. Cool! “Creaza offers you an integrated, web-based toolbox for creative work, both at school and in your free time.  You use the toolbox along with various fully developed thematic universes:  historical periods, fairy-tales, fantasy worlds, and current challenges, such as climate/environment.” However, it’s another site not supported by WordPress. Oh well, have a look at my creation:  http://www.creaza.com/members/classroomqueen. It’s pretty basic but then again I didn’t read the instructions.

I guess I could try the sites that are supported but maybe tomorrow because I’m down to 21% power and the red line is showing on my battery icon.

In case you were wondering, here are the supported sites.

“You can use all of these:

I wonder what I should try tomorrow?