Digital Storytelling with Multimedia Tools

Mind/Shift recommends what it calls cool, new, and easy-to-use multimedia tools for students.  Meograph (with teacher licenses beginning at $19.99) helps students create multimedia stories with “Meograph Moments” that may feature video, audio, timelines, text, images, maps, links, and student narration about their moments. Zeega, free to individual users, lets students make their own interactive Web stories as they capture content available in the cloud. Zeega stories developed by students may be viewed by others who “click their way through each story, one webpage leading to another. . .  WeVideo, with free and for pay versions, is a video-editing collaboration tool that your students can use to upload media clips and edit them.  A group of students can work on a project at the same time, and projects can be stored in WeVideo’s Google Drive App.

If you are interested in digital storytelling, you’ll want to take a look at the handy Mind/Shift chart that compares the following video editing tools: Windows Live Movie Makers, iMovie11, WeVideo, Zeega, and Meograph.

Webinars: Not Always Scheduled with Teachers in Mind

eSchool News sponsors a nice variety of Webinars, which are great for teachers and administrators.  If you’re like me, you don’t always have time within the school day to take advantage of online learning when it is scheduled.  It’s rather difficult for teachers and often tech coordinators, as well, to attend sessions scheduled for times like 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., but don’t forget that many organizations offering Webinars keep archives of their sessions. Okay, so you won’t be in on interaction during the session, but often there isn’t much you’ll miss.  So, if you can’t make the eSchool News Webinar, “Learning in the Cloud,” that’s scheduled for March 21, 2013 at 4 p.m. PT, you can catch up on the content in the archives whenever you want.  Some of eSchool News’ archived sessions include information on BYOD, Chromebooks, Google Apps and writing, eRate, creating online learning programs, tips for teaching online, implementing tablets, and cutting costs.

More Effective Learning Through Multimedia

The National Academies Press offers a concise chart that gives guidelines for creating educational multimedia. Following the guidelines will help students gain deeper meaning from multimedia. Some of the rules to follow are: “exclude extraneous words, pictures, and sounds”, keep in mind that “graphics with narration are more effective than graphics with narration and on-screen text”, “present lessons in user-paced segments”, “present names and characteristics of key concepts in advance of the main lesson”, “use words and pictures”, and “narrate in a conversational style”. Go to The National Academies Press site to review all the guidelines.

How Should Technology Be Used? Perfect Quotes from Marc Prensky

#PRENSKYPERSPECTIVE, tweets written by Marc Prensky, author of Brain Gain, Don’t Bother Me Mom—I’m Learning, and a host of other books, essays, articles, and speeches about tech and students, advises us that:

“Technology should be used POWERFULLY to expand students’ horizons, not TRIVIALLY to do old things in new ways.”

“Today’s kids hate being told, but enjoy teaching themselves. They need guidance & coaching from adults to do it best.”

“Technology gives kids power that people their age have never had. Let’s help them use it wisely.”

“Technology is now part of 21^st century humans’ minds and thinking. People now REQUIRE technology to do their best.”

“In 2013, E-books will become THE books.”

Are Libraries Going Away?

The look of the library is changing, but not its purpose. Maybe we are not ordering printed encyclopedia sets, teaching students about the card catalog, or insisting that silence be maintained; but libraries continue to be an essential part of education. Like our classrooms, they are evolving into more active environments where students learn, collaborate, experiment, and create. According to Laura Devaney’s article in eSchool News, some of the challenges for us as libraries change include: funding, parent reaction to non-traditional libraries, providing accessibility for students with disabilities and those who do not speak English, having enough technology resources, providing security related to student use of online resources, and dealing with problems of methodology and content.

Electric Summer

The Electric Company (TEC) Summer Learning Program aims to lessen children’s “brain drain” during the summer. To do this, the Company offers activities that feature literacy, numeracy, and the vocabulary of math. Children enjoy the story that ties the programs together as they work with lessons that feature television episodes, online gaming, and print materials. Included are 36 hours of learning content, YouTube links to 10-minute narratives, 12-levels of the Adventures of a Prankster Planet, 12 group activities, 24 skill-building sheets, and orientation training for parents and teachers. WestEd research on the program showed that students completing the lessons made significant gains in both reading and mathematics skills and that 90% of teachers using it felt that it increased motivation and confidence of their students.

The Nerdy Teacher Wants You to Reflect

Nick Provenzano, the Nerdy Teacher, offers his Year-End Tech Reflections in Edutopia. He suggests that those of us in education should take time to think about the tech tools and lessons we used with our students this year in order to determine how to make our use of technologies even better next year.  As summer vacation approaches and with our school-year memories fresh in mind, we should ask ourselves questions such as:

What tools did I use and how did I use them?

What tools helped me accomplish what I wanted with my students?

What wouldn’t I use in the coming school year?

What are my goals for my students and for me for the future?

Norway’s Innovative Creaza Education Now Available in US

Tool Factory is offering the Creaza Education software suite, which features the programs Mindomo, Cartoonist, MovieEditor, and AudioEditor. These are Web-based programs that help students create visual maps, cartoons, movies and recordings. Student work can be done at school or home and can be stored online and downloaded to a computer. All movie formats are supported therefore allowing students to use any type of camera, including their cell phone cameras, for projects.  Sample projects can be viewed on the Creaza site. Pricing for up to 500 users is $999 for elementary schools and $1499.99 for secondary schools. Custom pricing is available for smaller or larger schools.