A tool that would be a useful collaborative space for upper elementary/middle school students. Allows you to add multimedia to a page easily, and organise them as you see fit.
"With the many enhancements to mobile devices, multimedia websites, e-books, interactive graphics, and social media, there's no question that the nature of reading has changed during the past decade.
But has the way reading is taught in elementary schools changed as well? And what should teachers be doing to get students ready for the realities of modern reading?"
"The First World War Poetry Digital Archive is an online repository of over 7000 items of text, images, audio, and video for teaching, learning, and research.
The heart of the archive consists of collections of highly valued primary material from major poets of the period, including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Vera Brittain, and Edward Thomas. This is supplemented by a comprehensive range of multimedia artefacts from the Imperial War Museum, a separate archive of over 6,500 items contributed by the general public, and a set of specially developed educational resources. These educational resources include an exciting new exhibition in the three-dimensional virtual world Second Life.
Freely available to the public as well as the educational community, the First World War Poetry Digital Archive is a significant resource for studying the First World War and the literature it inspired."
The question of how to use technology in the classroom can often divide a school. Some teachers will embrace what's available to them, designing innovative multimedia projects which use all the gadgets at hand. Others, perhaps as a reaction to the first group, will resolve to do things the way they've always done, at best sending students to the computer lab to type up a final paper. Technology is present, but it's tokenized. The digital divide continues to thrive, not just across geographic and socio-economic boundaries, but from one classroom to the next.
Pics4Learning is a safe, free image library for education. Teachers and students can use the copyright-friendly photos and images for classrooms, multimedia projects, web sites, videos, portfolios, or any other project in an educational setting.
A graphic that depicts the Technology Taxononmy
I will talk about incorporating multimedia in the classroom as something all teachers should be doing but I definitely want teachers to know that they shouldn't stop there. To reach high levels of engagement, thinking, and to narrow the digital divide, teachers must turn technology over to students and guide them as they become their own content producers and influencers on the community outside the classroom.
"Neuroscience & the Classroom: Making Connections is a self-contained distance-learning course distributed free of charge on the Web. The course is designed by Kurt Fischer, director of the Mind, Brain, and Education Program at Harvard University Graduate School of Education; Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, assistant professor of education at the Rossier School of Education and assistant professor of psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California; and Matthew H. Schneps, George E. Burch Fellow in Theoretic Medicine and Affiliated Sciences at the Smithsonian Institution and director of the Laboratory for Visual Learning at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).
The multimedia course consists of six units, with an introduction and a conclusion. Each unit contains many integrated videos and sidebars of additional information, as well as a list of resources."
<< Smarthistory.org is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional art history textbook. Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker began smARThistory in 2005 by creating a blog featuring free audio guides in the form of podcasts for use in The Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Soon after, we embedded the audio files in our online survey courses. The response from our students was so positive that we decided to create a multi-media survey of art history web-book. We created audios and videos about works of art found in standard art history survey texts, organized the files stylistically and chronologically, and added text and still images. >>