Multimedia Web 2.0 Tools with Educator Accounts

Many Web 2.0 sites offer services designed with educators in mind. They provide secure, private sites for students and teachers to share their work.

What’s even better is that these sites are free or very inexpensive. Here are four exceptional digital storytelling tools to add to your toolbox. Encourage your teachers and students to use these to incorporate multimedia in the classroom.

Animoto for Education

    Create music videos to enliven your lessons or have students create them as the final product in a unit. 

     “Animoto Shorts are 30-seconds in length and free for everyone. You can produce, remix, and share as many as you’d like. Full-length videos, in contrast, are extended in length. A video’s length is determined by the number of images and the music it uses.” ~ from Animoto’s Since You Asked section

     Educators receive a free All-Access pass (a $30.00 value) which allows both them and their students to create full length videos. Click here to learn more including how to create multiple email addresses that allow you to monitor each student’s account.   The Animoto site also has several examples of how educators have used it in their classrooms.

VoiceThread for Education 

Twilight Book Review (VoiceThread)

    

more about “Twilight Book Review (VoiceThread)“, posted with vodpod

 
“Ed.VoiceThread is a secure K-12 network for students and teachers to collaborate and share ideas with classrooms anywhere in the world.”~ Ed.VoiceThread homepage

This is the only service discussed in this post that costs – but the cost is low and well worth it! See the K-12 pricing brochure for more information.

A great resource:  VoiceThread 4 Education wiki

Glogster for Education

     Glogster, a poster creation site, “gives support and help with creating school accounts and keeping Glogs PRIVATE.” Use the posters to liven up a wiki page or have students create projects.” ~ from Glogster’s Teachers, try education 2.0 page

     Technology and Education Box of Tricks  Read this blog post to get an excellent overview of Glogster.

Smilebox for Education

Make a Smilebox scrapbook

“Smilebox is an easy and creative way to safely send photos, videos and personalized information to your students and parents in a secure way. It’s perfect for newsletters, overviews of teaching units, performance and field trip recaps, classroom activities and more. ” ~from Smilebox’s Welcome to the Teacher Toolbox page

Educators can sign up for a free premium Club Smilebox account (a $39.99 value).

What other multimedia Web 2.0 tools out there have upgraded educator accounts?  Please help me add to the list!

YouTube Alternatives (continued)

A few days ago, I shared five educational video sites to try when YouTube is blocked at school. If I had been keeping up with my Google Reader, I would have read Joyce Valenza’s Dec. 19th post in which she shares several ways of using YouTube videos in school despite its being blocked.

Dean Mantz commented:

This is a good time to discuss the downloading of YouTube via third party applications. I agree with “Bob” about the YouTube agreement. Here is a portion of the Terms of Use: 4. General Use of Website-Permission and Restrictions C. You agree not to access User Submissions (defined below) or YouTube Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate. So, is the use of the sites above legal or not? I will leave that to you folks to decide.

Joyce replied to Dean:

Before I say “no” to this, I will try to contact the YouTube folks after the holiday. (No email, just phone number.) In another statement, they advise: “Our community guidelines and clear messaging on the site make it clear that users must own or have permission from copyright holders to *post* any videos. We take copyright issues very seriously. We prohibit users from *uploading* infringing material and we cooperate with copyright holders to identify and promptly remove infringing content.” (My asterisks) My question is, is it fair use if you don’t post and simply use the file temporarily in a classroom? Are we okay if we do contact the creator of the video?

As a LMS concerned with copyright issues, I had checked the YouTube user’s terms of agreement before suggesting using “back door” entry into YouTube. I will be interested to read what Joyce discovers.

Image attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/42788859@N00/318947873

Take Five: YouTube Alternatives

What do you do when YouTube is blocked at your school?  There are many other sites where you can find educational videos.  Hopefully, you will be able to access some of these from your school:

JohnLocker.com

“JohnLocker.com was started in April of 2008 to help students, teachers, educators, and the public get educated on a variety of topics. As the first user powered online learning network, you can expect to come away with knowledge that both challenges and empowers you.

By harnessing the power of social communities and video sharing, JohnLocker.com is able to provide the best documentaries and educational videos found on the web. It is our goal to make the process of watching, adding, rating, and discussing the videos as simple as possible. ”

Categories:  Conspiracy, History, Political, Religious, Science, Sports, Weird, Music, War, Nature, and Society

How Stuff Works

How Stuff Works’ Video site includes categroized videos from Discovery, The Learning Channel, the Science Channel, and Reuters.  Categories include Adventure, Animals, Auto, Computer, Electronics, Entertainment, Food, Geography, Health, History, Home and Garden, Money, People, and Science. 

What a wide range of videos!  I watched “Loch Ness Monster Evidence” and “It’s All Geek to Me: Cell Phone Tricks” (cut through the carrier’s message you usually have to wait through to be able to leave someone a voice mail) from just the home page.

Edublogs TV

This video hosting site is dedicated to education.  Categories included Career and Technology Education, College and University, Elementary, Fine Arts, Globalstudent, Globalteacher, High School, Languages, Math, Middle School, Moodle, Professional Development, Reading, Science, Social Studies, and Writing.

Connect with like-minded educators through the social networking aspect of the site, listen and download audio clips (including dance, electronic, hip-hop, Latin, pop, and new age among others), and join and upload your own videos.

TeacherTube and SchoolTube

Both of these sites are offered to educators as alternatives to YouTube.  Just as at YouTube, there are gems to be found at each site. 

Now, if my addition is correct, I’ve offered five alternatives.  But perhaps I should ask Ma and Pa Kettle to check my figures.

Scholastic Videos

 

more about “Scholastic Videos“, posted with vodpod

 

 

 

 

Scholastic Videos offers a variety of videos that will interest media specialists and teachers.  Since I am currently reading The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, I found the above embedded author interview especially interesting.

Author Interviews

Other in-depth author interviews that can be found on the site include Gordon Korman, David Shannon, Cornelia Funke, Holly Black, Rick Riordan, Kate Klise, Meg Cabot, and Jordan Sonnenblick.

Authors discuss a variety of topics in the interviews including how they get ideas for their books, how they conduct research for books, what the best and worst parts of being an author are, and give advice to students wishing to pursue writing or artistic careers.  They also discuss specific books they have written and/or illustrated.

Exploring Books

This section of the site offers video booktalks, video book trailers, author read-alouds, and the Hugo Cabret Flashlight Reader. 

Transcripts are available for many of the video booktalks (which were written by Joni Bodart). The book trailers are done in a variety of formats including authors discussing their books, animation, and video footage.  The trailer for Skeleton Creek by Patrick Carmen which is to be released on Feb. 10, 2009, looks intriguing!

Scholastic News

This section of the site offers both professional and student created videos on a number of topics including National News, International News, Sports, and Movies, TV, and Music.

Professional Development

This section provides Classroom Management in Photos videos, Pam Allyn Talkabouts, and Our Advisors’ Classrooms videos. 

The Pam Allyn videos discuss topics such as teachers retaining their own teaching styles while preparing students for high stakes testing, optimizing teaching and learning time,  supporting ELL students,  advice for teachers, and two other topics.

Our Advisors’ Classrooms videos take viewers inside the classrooms where they can get a feel of how other teachers at various grade levels set up their classrooms for success.

The Classroom Management in Photos videos give explanations on how to set up classroom routines including taking attendance, end of the day routines, morning arrival routines, and transitions routines.

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Scholastic has compiled a wonderful set of resources for teachers and media specialists at this site that are worth checking out!

Christmas Greetings Animoto-Style

Use Animoto to create a holiday greeting card!

To simplify the process, create an Animoto folder in your pictures.  Copy and paste all of the images you wish to include in your greeting card to the folder so that when you are asked to upload your images, you can choose all of the photos at once (Control + shift). 

I originally uploaded 18 pictures to my working file in Animoto, but only 9 of them were incorporated into the free 30 second greeting card.  Using the remix feature, I was able to delete 5 of the pictures, rearrange the order of the remaining ones,  and choose another tune which allowed all 13 images to be used.

Animoto simplifies posting your videos to many sites, including Facebook, WordPress, MySpace, and more.

Getting Your Money’s Worth: Libraries

Book Meme

Confession time:  my Google Reader had 660 blog posts in it when I opened it tonight.  I haven’t had time to read others’ posts much less write new ones myself.  But reading Doug Johnson’s Dec. 2nd post intrigued me enough to take part in this little meme.

“He was replaced by Minuit, who arrived in May on the ship Sea-Mew and who will be responsible for the entire settlement.”

~ “Manhattan bought for $24 by Dutch.” Chronicle of America.  Mount Kisco, N.Y.: Chronicle Publications (no publication date given)

Rules:
* Get the book nearest to you. Right now.
* Go to page 56.
* Find the 5th sentence.
* Write this sentence – either here or on your blog.
* Copy these instructions as commentary of your sentence.
* Don’t look for your favorite book or your coolest but really the nearest.

Okay – try hard NOT to look at the 5th sentence on p. 56 of the nearest book right now!  Thanks for the fun, Doug.

Image attribution:

http://www.amazon.com/Chronicle-America-Clifton-Daniel/dp/0131337459