Vimeo: Video Hosting Site

As you may have read in an earlier post, I have been piloting Kidblog.org with an 8th grade English class. The teacher wanted the students to interview each other as a historical literary character and post the videos to their blogs in Kidblog. However, we were finding that we were quickly tapping out our 100M of space allotted by Kidblog. Even if the site manager increased our space, we still would not be able to host all of the videos on the kidblog platform. At the suggestion of the Kidblog site manager, we decided to try hosting our videos on Vimeo.com so that we do not take up our blogging space and we can then embed our videos directly into the post. We were pleasantly surprised to find Vimeo very easy to use. In addition, they grant you 500M of space a week! If you decide to upgrade to a paid account, you can get as much as 5G of space a week. One of the features that appealed to us the most was that the teacher could choose to make the videos private so that only select Vimeo members can view them. Another option was to make the video password protected so a user would have to enter the password in order to view the video. This feature works well with Kidblog since the students have to login to Kidblog to view the student posts anyway, and then they can enter a password to view the embedded video. This helps with keeping the video secure. If you choose to make your video password protected, the embedded video player will no longer have the "share" button enabled so others cannot embed the video into other sites. Very nice!