Video Technical Issues

There are many technical factors that influence your ability to use video and sound files on school networks with students. The simplest way of planning a multimedia based lesson and avoiding disaster is to do the following.

• Load all the files you intend to use onto the school intranet.
• Ask a student to log in for you and test the activity using their account
• Complete the activity for yourself. If there are any major problems write down the error messages and discuss these with your network administrator. Usually they will be able to find a solution.
  

Common Issues

• Avoid watching streaming media over most school networks. They usually do not have enough bandwidth to cope.
• Student folders are too small to store video files and they cannot save their work. A common measure to stop students abusing the Internet.
• Sound and Video capabilities of machines have been disabled;nothing happens. Another way of preventing students from playing games in classes.
• Appropriate software such as the Windows media player is missing. No file icon can be seen. Often used to stop students playing music in classes.
• Machines take too long to process producer or sound files. Hard to fix in some cases.
• Internet is too slow.

Presentations

Video files are fairly large and using them with a data show can sometimes result in a blank screen. This usually occurs because the video is being shown once on a data show and at the same time on your computer. Switching to using an external screen only, the data show usually solves this problem.ie you will not be able to see the video on your computer at the same time.

There are many other issues that you may encounter. The above are common problems and your network administrator can usually solve all of them with exception of the last two.