This article suggests 10 ways that educators can use visual media in classroom lessons. Using a digital camera, students can take photos and video as part of original public-service announcements, create multimedia book reports on Glogster or organize a fictional crime-scene investigation.
Read the full story, CLICK HERE, Tech & Learning
What’s NextVista.org?
An online library of free videos for learners everywhere – our goal is to gather a set of resources to help you learn just about anything, meet people who make a difference in their communities, and even discover new parts of the world. Next Vista for Learning wants to post your educational videos online, too. Everyone has an insight to share and yours may be just what some student or teacher somewhere needs!
The ‘Light Bulbs’ Collection
NextVista.org believes learning is stronger when it starts with an engaging introduction of each topic. With teachers and students from all over the world contributing content, it will get easier and easier to find the presentation a student needs to say, “I get it.”
With the resources of the library available for free to anyone at any time, students will be in a good position to learn when they are most ready to do so. For teachers, the available videos can be used in the classroom to generate discussion, or even when planning lessons to generate ideas. Having a simple system for watching others’ work will strengthen professional development, which is another goal of NextVista.org.
The ‘Global Views’ Collection
Reading about another country or even watching a documentary can give kids a good sense of a community in another part of the world. However, when in a video the one introducing the school or community is another teenager, the message has added interest for the student. Students will not only learn from the messages of teenagers in other countries, they will think about how they can use what they see to better introduce their own schools and communities.
One goal of the Global Views collection is to help students better understand the wondrous variety around the planet. This is only the start, though, as these videos can also be used to generate discussions between groups in e-mail or blog exchanges. Next Vista wants this collection to help young people understand how truly close they are to their international peers.
The ‘Seeing Service’ Collection
The videos in this collection will highlight good deeds large and small. One video might show how an organization used microloans to pull people in remote villages out of the poverty that has oppressed them for generations. Another might show how one man takes time each week to read to children at a local library.
The hope is that students who wonder about their own value will see what the people in these videos do and realize that those are things they are capable of doing, too. Students might encounter these videos as writing prompts, could produce one themselves as part of a project, or even choose to watch one just to be reminded that there are indeed good people out there.
The TL Advisor Blog always has good stuff. And today is no exception, there is an excellent good list of websites for designing things by a guest blogger.
“ We’re getting a little fussier about the way our stuff looks. My students and I have come to the realization that this read/write web thing makes us all not only writers, but designers as well.
So, I’ve been collecting a full range of tools on our New Tools Guide (Playing with images, avatars, fonts, and colors), and I thought I share a few tools that are fast becoming our desert island apps for the design of presentations, digital stories, wikis, websites, and whatever else we publish or broadcast.”
When I clicked on the New Tools link, I discovered a page that looked a little like a LiveBinders, but was created with a tool called Springshare; practical web 2.0 applications built specifically for libraries and educational institutions. They have a free trial, but I am guessing it is pretty pricey since you have to email for a quote.
LiveBinders is similar and FREE, guess I will stick with it. Here is an example on Digital Storytelling a friend of mine, Dean Mantz put together. Dean has quite an extensive collection of LiveBinders on his Public Shelf. I am just getting started with LiveBinders, but really liking it so far, just need to make it a habit.
The list includes:
- Picnik Swiss army knife image editor
- Flickr Blue Mountains for finding copyright-friendly images
- BeFunky edit images, add regular photographic & artsy effects, add graphics, and text
- FotoFlexer basic photo editor
- Aviary free web-based suite includes:
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- Talon: the screen capturer with Firefox extension (my image grabber)
- Phoenix: the layer-based image editor
- Peacock: the visual laboratory for creating amazing effects and visualizations
- Toucan: the color pallette coordinator
- Roc: the music creator
- Myna: the audio editor
- Peacock: the effects editor
- Raven: vector editor
- Dafont.com download & install fonts
- Fontspace wide variety of font selections
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- CoolText.com interactive text/banner/button generator
- 3D Text Maker generates static or animated text
- Glowtxt generate text with or without glow
- Signbot create animated srolling LED signage
- Supalogo use the pull-down menu to quickly generate text, choosing color, outline, size, transparency
- Textanim 2.0 Animated text generator
- Adobe Kuler explore and create color schemes, save and download themes
- Color Scheme Designer allows users to navigate colors using a color wheel and to easily identify hex numbers..
- Colour Lovers offers the opportunity to browse palettes, patterns, and individual colors, and to create and save your own palettes.
- Pictaculous Upload a photo, generate a palette to complement it.
- Color Explorer free online toolbox for designing and working with color palettes
- Photofunia cool image generators
- Big Huge Labs create motivational, movie posters, trading cards, magazine covers, pop art, and more.
- Image Chef hundreds of templates for both still and animated creations
While you can’t add text or shapes to a photo in iPhoto, you can do it using either Pages or Preview. Pages allows you to add a variety of shapes and even other photos. Preview allows text and simple shapes.
Glen Weibe, History Tech and ESSDACK has an excellent list of resources for teaching about the crisis in Japan. Japanese earthquake teaching resources / other stuff
100+ Teaching Resources About The Japan Crisis: http://edudemic.com/2011/03/japan-lessons/
Japan’s Crisis (middle school lesson: http://www.teachablemoment.org/middle/japancrisis.html
The Red Cross has activated the Japan relief appeal:
http://www.redcross.ca/article.asp?id=38380&tid=001
Person in Japan finder by google:
http://japan.person-finder.appspot.com/?lang=ja
Google Crisis Response:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/crisisresponse/japanquake2011.html#resources
NHK live:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nhk-gtv
TBS live:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tbstv
Teacher and school-improvement coach Elena Aguilar used digital cameras to help a group of middle-school boys learn to share and understand the realities of their lives in urban Oakland, Calif., neighborhoods. Aguilar’s students took many pictures of blight before beginning to see more positive angles, and used the images as starting points for writing assignments they initially had resisted.
Read the full story, Edutopia.org/Elena Aguilar’s blog (3/8)
On Friday Google officially announced new changes to their Picasa storage policy. These changes affect all users, regardless of if you have paid for extra storage or not. From now on, any photos that you have uploaded that “are 800 pixels or smaller and videos that are 15 minutes or less in length no longer count” towards your storage limit. This could provide an easy spot to host pictures for Tweets and other social media.
Read the full story and see the How-to’s, CLICK HERE
I tend to use Flickr, but I do like the no limits for the most part. Might have to give Picasa a good try.
The CNN Freedom Project: Ending Modern Day Slavery” is an excellent multimedia resource on human trafficking. Wow is is startling, and would fit right in to many units of study. The first one that comes to mind is when we study the Civil War. As Americas, we just assume the Civil War ended slavery. Well, did it?
Here is the link to Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day Blog resources for more things to hlep in your unit of studdy or lesson plan: The Best Resources For Learning About Human Trafficking Today.
Put yourself on the map: Easily make shareable, animated trips with photos, music, links and stories.
At its most basic level, Tripline is a way for you to tell a story by putting places on a map. That’s a very human activity that has been happening for thousands of years. It’s also a way for you to easily answer those questions we hear so often: Where are you guys going? When are you leaving? How was the trip? What did you do? – the kind of questions that photos don’t answer. And just like in the movies, the Tripline player gives you an animated line moving across the map with a soundtrack. That’s appropriate, because our journeys are our own epic tales of discovery and adventure. Press play and see for yourself.
And check out this example fo the Lewis & Clark Expedition. WOW!!
Brad Flickinger, School Technology Solutions, has a great entry on his blog about his kids, elementary kids by the way making movies.
Below the photo, there are tlinks to several projects his kids have made. It is quite impressive. I am getting ready to begin my movie making and digital storytelling unint in my class. So this is perfect. Wow such rich impressive examples what can be done. And the fact that these are elementary kids, makes it even more so. Please check it out and discover the possibilities.
While QuickTime X can’t export a video frame as an image, iPhoto can. Simply pause the video in iPhoto at the frame you want to export. Then choose File, Export. Switch from QuickTime to File Export and choose JPEG as the kind. Save the file. You’ll get file that looks like a video file, but simply rename it with the file extension .jpg and you’ll see that it is actually a jpeg file. However you will need iPhoto from iLife 11 for this trick to work.
Exporting iPhoto Slideshows as Video
Want more tips and tricks, Check out the MacMost for lots of great video tutorials about iPhoto
Wow, Awesome Library organizes the Web with 37,000 carefully reviewed resources, including the top 5 percent in education. This is a really cool site and worth checking out.
http://www.awesomelibrary.org/
Seven million free images are available to teachers and schools.
In spring 2009, Edutopia.org and Life.com offered our visitors the chance to choose an educational theme for a photo gallery created by the curators of Life’s newly released online library. You voted, and here’s a link to your winning choice: Civil Rights: Teachable Moments. And be sure to read how Life.com deputy editor Ben Cosgrove put together this gallery.
These and seven million other images of American history and culture are available on Life.com. The relaunched site — accessible to everyone but especially useful to educators — makes the entire archives of photo giants Life magazine and Getty Images available free. Users can view galleries curated by the site’s editors or search the library by names, dates, subjects, and locations. The archive chronicles current events, too, with daily news galleries and the addition of 3,000 new Getty photos a day.
http://learning.snagfilms.com/film/search-for-the-afghan-girl
The search for the mysterious “Afghan Girl,” whose haunting, green-eyed gaze captivated the world in a NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC magazine cover photograph, takes EXPLORER on a world-wide journey in an attempt to solve the case of a missing person. In January 2002, photographer Steve McCurry, who took the 1984 photograph and has been searching for the girl ever since, traveled to Pakistan with a National Geographic EXPLORER team to search one last time. The refugee camp where the original encounter took place was about to be demolished. War in Afghanistan continues. The plight of refugees there and in Pakistan is worsening. Has the “Afghan Girl” survived? With a lot of detective work and a little luck, the EXPLORER team, together with McCurry, finds a woman who could be the “Afghan Girl.” How can they confirm that this is the same person as the child photographed nearly 20 years ago? National Geographic uses several methods, including state of the art iris recognition, the FBI facial recognition techniques and the technology used by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Sigourney Weaver narrates.
Learning Questions
1. Where does photographer Steve McCurry begin his search to find the “Afghan girl”?
2. Who are the “elders” in the refugee community and what is their role?
3. What does Steve McCurry say he looks for in people’s faces?
4. What is the meaning of “Afghan girl’s” real name?
5.What does the Afghan woman ask from America when Steve McCurry finds her?
6. What did you like about this film?
Join The Discussion
Don’t be shy, leave a comment below. Educators, students and parents can use this forum in a number of ways:
+ Start a classroom discussion
+ Tell us how you used this educational video for learning
+ Or, just leave a regular old comment on what you thought of the video
They all support Google Maps for you to easily find the place you are interested in. They all have Google Earth integrated for you to get the location 3D view and they allow users to upload old photographs of any geographical locations.
HistoryPin
Historypin is a global project created by the social movement We Are What We Do, in partnership with Google. The site works as a digital time machine, allowing people to view and share history online. According to the site creators, its mission is to get families back together to share memories and organize them using the site.
LookBackMaps
LookBackMaps is another (less fun than History Pin, but cool too) way to visually organize, explore and engage in historical photographs through web.
The collection stored on the site was started by mapping the “millions of historical photos available through public libraries and private collections on the web”. However, the creators do need help and do allow users to help them make their collection larger.
SepiaTown
SepiaTown lets you view and share “thousands” of mapped historical images from around the globe.
The site has a huge collection of photos (with carefully cited sources for each one):
The NOW/THEN link switches to Google Street View to compare the historical place with how it looks now. Each photo has notes with some historical and geographic information on it.
A World of Ones and Zeroes
This site is an invaluable resource for teaching about the Civil War. Their goal is to digitally secure, preserve, organize, create a database of, and make available online every image pertaining to the American Civil War. The mission of the Center for Civil War Photography is to educate the public about Civil War photography, its role in the conflict, and its rich variety of forms and formats; to digitally secure original images and preserve vintage prints; to enhance the accessibility of photographs to the public; and to present interpretive programs that use stereoscopic and standard images to their fullest potential.
Do you use Calvin and Hobbes comic strips in lessons? Now there is a Calvin and Hobbes search engine. Type in your query — homework, reading, etc — and then get the text and, in many cases, a link to the strip itself.
You might also be interested in from Larry Ferlazzo’s blog The Best Comic Strips For Students & Teachers — 2010 (And Earlier) and Part Two Of The Best Comic Strips For Students & Teachers — 2010.
