Media and Learning 2013

ActiveWatch publishes a new educational product aimed at secondary school pupils to better understand news production and to learn how to question and verify credibility of information in the media.

The pedagogical kit was developed within the ONAIR European project for media education, an initiative of the Sapienza University in Rome, and it benefits of the support of the Romanian Ministry of Education, Research, Youth and Sports.

S.H.A.R.P European network introduces a new and FREE pedagogical resource for professionals interested in media education and new technologies.

The pedagogical kit "Teaching and Learning Digital Media" is intended for teachers, educators, trainers and others who want to improve their competences in the field of education about and through new media technologies. The central areas of inquiry are images (still imagery, films, videos) and web tool creation and application (platforms for information searches, for sharing, for producing media content, etc.).

The material is based on the educational experiences engendered during the S.H.A.R.P project by the different partners within their own contexts. These projects were conducted with different targets (e.g. students, teachers, adults, elderly people, minorities) and with particular topics (chosen from the main themes of Sharp: identity, memory, territory....) in mind.

The information presented in the kit sheds light on the main theme of the S.H.A.R.P (Sharing and RePresenting) from both theoretical and practical perspectives. The five theoretical chapters of the kit aim to provide help in answering the five main questions below. They can be used to plan and implement trainings "about and with media"; to work with ICT in the didactic field; to analyse and produce images and films with a school class, with university students or in adult education; and to facilitate social enquiries with given groups. The five questions are:

1. How can I plan a project?

2. How can I didacticise ICT in a project?

3. How can I analyse images, film and sound?

4. How can I produce images and films?

5. How can I collect significant social resources?

The kit also contains a series of practical examples on using new media for developing media skills. You can find a detailed description of nine workshops conducted by S.H.A.R.P partners from 7 EU countries: Italy, France, Portugal, Cyprus, Lithuania, Romania and Bulgaria.

ActiveWatch is the Romanian partner of the project and we contributed to the kit with Chapter 7: Visual Language and Representation of Reality.

The entire pedagogical kit is available for FREE in English and some chapters were translated into Romanian by local partner. Soon, the material will also be available in French.

The French website 1jour1actu - Des outils pour mieux comprendre l'info contains hundreds of contents (articles, videos, activities, dossiers, games, interactive sheets) on many different topics, ranging from Art, Literature, History, Biology, Science, to media literacy, sport, actualities.
The contents are aimed at the use in primary education classrooms. Each content is composed by attractive images, clear and short texts and a list of related contents for further deepening.
The teacher section provides them with “The highlights of the week”, files to download for the use in the classroom and an overview of the news and activities of the week.

Teaching Channel is a video showcase — on the Internet and TV — of inspiring and effective teaching practices in US schools. It has a rapidly growing community of registered members who trade ideas and share inspiration from each other. With the help of the Tch community, its mission is to revolutionize how teachers learn, connect, and inspire each other to improve the outcomes for all K-12 students across the US (K-12 stands for: "from Kindergarten (K) for 4–6-year-olds through twelfth grade (12) for 18–19-year-olds or in other words it generally coincides with European Primary and Secondary education).

In order to accomplish its mission, there are three simple goals, all of them reliant on input from teachers:
• Build professional learning resources that teachers want
• Deepen and improve opportunities for teacher learning
• Elevate and celebrate teachers in our society

Teaching Channel videos are produced by a team of professionals — a collaborative effort between video production experts, education advisors, and the classroom teachers themselves, but it is important to note that Teaching Channel does not determine or influence the content taught in its videos.
The video library offers educators a wide range of subjects for grades K-12. The videos also include information on alignment with Common Core State Standards and ancillary material for teachers to use in their own classrooms.

Teaching Channel Presents is a weekly one-hour TV program that features Teaching Channel videos, it is broadcast only in the United States.
Teaching Channel is somewhat similar to the UK's Teacher TV channel that ceased to exist in 2009.

Tubechop is an online resource that allows to easily chop a funny or interesting section from any YouTube video and share it via a link, an embed code or through the main social networks. The chopped section can be rated and commented.
This resource can be useful to take out interesting or relevant sections from longer videos and start a discussion also via the possibility to post comments.

The Public Domain Review is a not-for-profit project dedicated to showcasing the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright works available online.
All works eventually falling out of copyright (from classic works of art, music and literature, to abandoned drafts, tentative plans, and overlooked fragments)are in the public domain, a vast commons of material that everyone is free to enjoy, share and build upon without restriction.
The Public Domain Review aims to help its readers to explore this rich terrain.
On the website it is possible to find:
- articles from leading scholars, writers, archivists, and artists provide fresh reflections and new angles on old material;
- the possibility to subscribe to the newsletter;
- browse public domain material organised in collections (films, audio, images and texts),
- a guide to finding interesting public domain works.

On this website you can learn foreign languages in a fun way: listen to popular songs and fill in the blanks. Test your knowledge of vocabulary in a fun way with music.

This website is designed to provide an accessible version of the popular video-sharing website YouTube. You can get the easy-to-use interface on your screen by simply copy and pasting a youtube link. Then you are asked if the video the system found is the right one. You click on the video and an interface will open with the video and a play/pause, skip back, skip forward and mute button. This website was developed to give people with disabilities an easier alternative interface to the standard youtube provides, where buttons are quite small and not always easy to handle.

Jonatan Academy is a project for creating educational videos in Dutch for elementary schools.
The videos present on the website have been made by 11-year-old kids for younger students to learn the basics of Mathematics and Dutch language. The normal making process for these videos includes a script, the elaboration of visual material in Powerpoint and the publication on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/user/jonatanschool).
These videos are thought as integration or repetition to what students learn from the teacher, to help them memorise better the concepts explained.
The website also contains instructions and tools that can be useful for medium and high school students and for teachers as a guide to an interesting and useful activity.

Jonathan Academy is een project om nederlandstalige educationele video's te maken voor het basisonderwijs.
De video's op de website werden door 11-jarige kinderen gemaakt om jongere leerlingen de basis van wiskunde
en het Nederlands te leren. Bij de normale procedure voor het maken van deze filmpjes hoort een scenario, de uitwerking van beeldmateriaal in Powerpoint en een publicatie op Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/user/jonatanschool).
Deze video's worden beschouwd als herhaling of bijkomende leerstof van wat de leerlingen zelf van de leerkracht leren, om hen zo te helpen beter de uitgelegde begrippen te onthouden. De website bevat ook instructies en hulpmiddelen die handig kunnen zijn voor studenten uit het middelbaar en voor leerkrachten als gids voor een interessante en bruikbare les.

SnagLearning features high-quality documentary films presenting them for free to an international online audience as educational tools to ignite meaningful discussion within the learning community. The library currently contains over 2,000 documentaries that are appropriate for students from middle school and up covering nearly every classroom subject.
Many of these videos are produced by well-known educational sources, including PBS and National Geographic.
Teachers can submit and share their own lesson plans, quizzes and homework ideas with fellow educators. On each film page there is a section containing learning questions related to the video and a commenting area that functions as public forum to share and discuss.