Media and Learning 2013

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.

Educational Technology and Mobile Learning is a blog providing users, students, teachers, leaders and managers of educational ICT with articles and tools to better integrate technology into education. Practical tools, ideas and tips come along with a selection of interesting readings on the subject, tutorials and guides. An entire section of this blog is also dedicated to articles covering reviews of free educational mobile apps that work on smart devices.

Flat World Knowledge is a large college textbook publishing company that allows students to read and share entire textbooks online for free. It develops and publishes peer-reviewed expert-authored college textbooks under a Creative Commons license.
This online library contains a comprehensive selection of books across disciplines including Business & Economics, Humanities and Social Sciences, Science, Professional and Applied Sciences, and Mathematics. The books are available for free online but can also be made portable and used across many digital devices or printed with a premium option, the All-Access Pass.
Flat World Knowledge offers several other possibilities too:
• teachers can adopt online books to use them in the classroom or can have students get their own printed copy (normally for a fraction of the normal textbook prices)
• books are open and can be reviewed, customised and reshared
• study aid tools such as key term flashcards, practice quizzes and audio guided study aids to help students succeed.

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.

This guide, in the form of a free PDF, has been produced as part of the project Virtual Stages Against Violence (VSAV), which can be framed within the conceptual and methodological horizon of media literacy. Aimed at teachers and educators, the guide constitutes the Toolkit of the project and contains five units with a series of educational activities about the topics and problems already dealt with in both the online game and the theatre plays. As the whole project does, these activities aim at developing an increased awareness among young people of both the risks and opportunities of digital media and online communication.
The Toolkit offers innovative and participatory methods to support, integrate and enrich the work carried out by educational institutions such as schools. The chosen education tools aim primarily to an active acquisition of skills and not just an acquisition of knowledge. The Toolkit is therefore a valuable complement to develop educational activities, raised more effective as being part of a creative, interactive and transversal learning experience.

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Questa guida, nella forma di un PDF gratuito, è stata prodotta come parte del progetto Virtual Stages Against Violence (VSAV), che può essere inserito nella cornice concettuale e metodologica dell’educazione ai media. Diretta a insegnanti ed educatori, la guida costituisce il toolkit del progetto e contiene cinque unità con una serie di attività educative sugli argomenti e sui problemi già trattati nel campo del gioco online e delle commedie teatrali. Come anche il progetto stesso nel suo insieme, queste attività hanno la finalità di sviluppare una maggiore coscienza tra i giovani sia riguardo i rischi e le opportunità dei media digitali, sia riguardo la comunicazione online.
La guida offre innovativi metodi partecipativi per sostenere, integrare e arricchire il lavoro portato avanti dalle istituzioni scolastiche ed educative in generale. Gli strumenti educativi scelti hanno lo scopo primario di far acquisire attivamente delle capacità, non limitandosi quindi all’acquisizione di conoscenza. Per questo motivo la guida è un prezioso aiuto allo sviluppo di attività educative, rese anche più efficaci in quanto parte di un’esperienza di apprendimento trasversale e interattivo.

In this section of the official website of the European Union it is possible to find the summaries of EU legislation on every subject. The linked page gives an overview of the legislation on IPR. The act the page refers to is the directive 2004/48/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 29 April 2004 on the enforcement of intellectual property rights.
The page is available in 15 languages.

BurningWell is a repository for public domain images. Basically, this means that it is allowed to use the images freely for any purpose, commercial or private. It is not necessary to pay or to acknowledge or give credit to the photographer or to the website. When recognizable people appear in any of the images, the photographers have obtained a "model release" and assigned all rights to the public domain. This allows the images to be used in any manner, including advertising.
Most of the images are donated by photographers (both professional and private) from around the world who believe that great images should be shared.
BurningWell started in 2006 and contains today more than 1400 images.
N.B.: the search engine redirects to another website containing many images (over 6000) but most of them are not for free.

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.

Zotero is an easy-to-use tool that helps to gather, organize, and analyse research sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects). It works as a reference manager software, allowing to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references, but also integrates some more social features like the ability to interact, tag and share the results of the performed researches in a variety of ways.
Zotero is an extension to Firefox, so it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object through the browser, and —on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. For the same reason, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications. It can also communicate with software running on your computer (such as Microsoft Word) and be used offline (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi).
Zotero's Unicode support allows you to import, store, and cite items in any language. You can change the language of Zotero, and of the citations and bibliographies created by Zotero. Finally, there is an experimental multilingual version of Zotero, which supports storage of item metadata in more than one language (transliterations and translations).
Documentation is completely available in English and most of the pages are also translated in many other languages.

The Teaching Copyright curriculum is a detailed, customizable learning plan containing five lessons about copyright law. They explore various aspects of this matter. Lesson topics include: the history of copyright law; the relationship between copyright and innovation; fair use and its relationship to remix culture; peer-to-peer file sharing.
By giving them a comprehensive set of tools to educate students about copyright while incorporating activities that exercise a variety of learning skills, the Teaching Copyright curriculum also aims at helping educators raise interesting questions on the subject and teach students how to use materials created by others.
The lesson plan concludes with a mock trial that tests the students' understanding of copyright and its limitations and encourages them to consider the positions of each party involved.