Free Technology for Teachers: 7 Resources for Creating Cartoons and Comics
Online applications for creating comics and cartoons. Lots of possibilities for digital storytelling here.
Educational Leadership:Literacy 2.0:Orchestrating the Media Collage
Guidelines for teachers for supporting multimedia and digital literacy
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know
If you’re using Facebook, especially if you use it with multiple groups of people (friends, family, professional contacts, bloggers), friend lists are highly recommended. This is also a good article to pass along to people who are resistant. To some extent, I figure all the privacy is illusory; people can still share what they know, after all. But it’s at least some protection.
Report from the National Council of Teachers of English with a call to action to teach writing appropriately for the 21st century. Writing now often happens outside school in social spaces where people learn informally through their peers. Includes an overview of how writing has been viewed historically and how that has affected how we teach writing.
“Writing has never been accorded the cultural respect or the support that reading has enjoyed, in part because through reading, society could control its citizens, whereas through writing, citizens might exercise their own control.”
“Writing has historically and inextricably been linked to testing.”
“In much of this new composing, we are writing to share, yes; to encourage dialogue, perhaps; but mostly, I think, to participate.”
“First, we have moved beyond a pyramid-like, sequential model of literacy development in which print literacy comes first and digital literacy comes second and networked literacy practices, if they come at all, come third and last.”
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Multimedia Serves Youths’ Desire to Express Themselves | Edutopia
High school students in California find their voice through multimedia and learn to make a difference through what they create and share
Literature review on research related to accessibility specifically for cognitive disabilities. One conclusion from this review is that there’s very little research actually out there to draw from; most guidelines and recommendations aren’t grounded in much evidence.
Using threaded comments to build a writing community in your classroom | Reflections on Teaching
A 6th grade teacher talks about the advantage of threaded blog comments for building a writing community. This encourages much more of students talking to each other and makes it easier to follow blog conversations.
Example project from the Developing 21st Century Literacy Skills course. The assignment is to develop a project where students will develop and demonstrate 21st century literacy skills. In this project, students create a multimedia presentation with information about their state as if they are working in the visitor’s bureau and trying to convince tourists to visit.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Yesterday one of my SMEs asked me how I learned about accessibility requirements for online learning. Like most of my instructional design knowledge, I guess I’m self-taught on accessibility. In a previous job, I was given the task of figuring out how to make text-based versions of interactive Flash practice activities. That project forced me to think about what it’s like to listen to content rather than read it. I didn’t have JAWS or another screen reader, but I used the Windows Narrator and at least tried to imagine whether the content would work if I was just listening.
Since then, I’ve spent more time educating myself. I read Joe Clark’s book, Building Accessible Websites (a bit outdated now, but available for free on his site). I’ve attended some conference presentations and have actually read through the all the legal requirements. I’ve been gradually adding accessibility features to courses over the last two years as I learn more. But it hasn’t been particularly systematic or formal learning.
At a conference this week, Natalie Kilkenny had a very valuable experience with informal learning about accessibility. The presenter never shows up, so someone in the audience started a discussion to share what people knew and what they were struggling with. As a result of that discussion, she found several new resources and gained some new perspectives on usability.
I’m curious about how you’re learning about accessibility in e-learning. I’d appreciate if you could take a minute and answer my poll. It’s only one question, but if you’re reading this in a feed reader you’ll probably need to visit my blog to take it.
If you have more to say, feel free to leave a comment too.
Infinite Thinking Machine: Friday Five: Create, Express, Learn with Primary Source Material
Five sites to find and use online primary source content with students, focusing on sites that encourage students to remix and share multimedia content. Some of the sites provide tools for production and publication.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
CC-licensed online book about open source as a business strategy. Might be helpful in explaining why our company chose an open source LMS to the people who had panic attacks.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Miro HD Video Player | Free internet tv and video podcast player.
Open source HD video player. You can download videos from YouTube and other sources in multiple file types and play them with this full screen player.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
A few weeks ago, Dave Ferguson shared Anne Derryberry’s interactive storyboard created with xtranormal. Dave was looking at this as a tool for instructional designers to create storyboards with more pop, but I’ve been thinking about this tool as a way for students to create content.
One of the courses I’m currently working on is about project-based learning with multimedia. We’ve been looking at a number of different tools for creating multimedia. Because it’s also about project-based learning, I also want to help our participants (who are mostly K-12 teachers) see how these tools can be used to communicate topics with real-world relevance. I remember doing a number of projects in school where we researched topics and then gave a speech, wrote an essay, put on a skit, or created a poster. Many of those were very valuable learning experiences, and I don’t think we should do away with those. What if students could do that research and have this as an option for presenting their findings though?
Obviously, this is a really brief example. Student projects could have a lot more depth than this. I spent about 90 minutes total creating this: 30 minutes for research, 30 minutes to write the script, and 30 minutes to create it at xtranormal (including signing up for an account and publishing to YouTube). I used the default camera options; I could have spent a lot more time tweaking the angles if I’d wanted. But as a proof of concept, I think this works pretty well. No technical expertise was required; quick tips guide you through the process and you just type the text for the scripts.
Besides the more informative presentations like this one, wouldn’t this be a cool tool for digital storytelling? You could have your characters act out a dialog. You can only have 2 characters at a time, but you could string together a series of short episodes to create something with more characters and settings.
I do have a few reservations about this though. It’s still in beta, so I’m not sure what the final product will feature. It’s clear that they don’t intend this to be a free product forever; the current unlimited free movies are called a “promotion.” I hope they’ll do some sort of freemium model so that at least limited free animations could be created at schools. K-12 teachers should note that the Terms of Service prohibit use by anyone under 13, as many sites do due to privacy laws. The restrictions on commercial use seem pretty typical; actually, they may be a bit more lenient than some of the other Web 2.0 sites. It doesn’t sound like they’re opposed to commercial use of their product, just that they want people to ask permission first.
With any of these content creation tools, it’s smart to review the TOS first and check what happens to your intellectual property. This was nice to see included: “For clarity, xtranormal does not assert any ownership over your User Content; rather, as between us and you, subject to the rights granted to us in these Terms of Service, you retain full ownership of all of your User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with your User Content.” Of course, they do claim the right to license and use your content for the site and their own promotion, but I always expect that from sites like this.
I’m looking forward to seeing what happens with this tool moving forward, as I think it has a lot of educational applications. I’d love to hear other ideas for projects with this tool. Also, are there any other tools out there that do something similar to xtranormal? I’d like to have a backup if they go down or price it unreasonably high.
Multimedia Learning » Compliance Poetry
Have boring content you want to make more interesting and memorable? What about putting it in poetry form? This is a creative use of poetry to create memorable summaries of copyright law. If intellectual property law can be made simpler to understand and remember, can’t your content too?
Our Boom De Yada « Cole Camplese: Learning and Innovation
How Discovery’s ad campaign with the Boom De Ah Da song inspired a 4th grade classroom and a family to create their own versions of the song and video. What a fun project!
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Copyright and Fair Use – Information & Library Services – UMUC
Summary of copyright and fair use, including guidelines for faculty and students for educational multimedia.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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