Media and Learning 2013

This guide book provides its readers with the ideas, methods, and critical understanding to support successful documentary making.

Considering what it means today to be a documentary filmmaker and the new technologies and forms of documentary that are emerging, this book helps the aspiring ‘total filmmaker’ understand the contemporary contexts for production, equipping you also with the understanding of creativity and visual storytelling you’ll need to excel. Bridging the gap between the theory and practice, it outlines the contemporary institutional, practical and financial contexts for production, always encouraging innovation and originality.

It gives an overview from the creative thinking process over production to financing and distribution, provides practical case studies support analysis and reflection, exercises, checklists, interviews with professionals and further reading materials that accompany each chapter. A historical overview of world documentary is also available.

Edudemic Education Apps is a list of more than 56,000 Education apps for iPad and iPhone. The library provides several research parameters such as age-content rating, supported devices and cost of the app.
For each app the library contains information details about the app (cost, downloadable size, author, etc.) as well as an overview and ratings based on users’ reviews.
The “compare” tool allows selecting various apps and displays their details next to one another so comparisons can be made easily. Some side services, such as the calculation of the average price of the apps, the buying guide and some ready-saved searches can result very useful too.

Tux Paint is a free drawing program for children (3 to 12) that combines an easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who guides children as they use the program. It is used in schools around the world as a computer literacy drawing activity.
The program runs on multiple platforms. It’s simple interface presents a number of useful drawing tools and at the same time relieve the user of the need to think about the technical details.
Sound and visual helps are available: fun sound effects are played when tools are selected and used and a cartoon mascot appears at the bottom to give tips, hints and information.
Parts of Tux Paint have currently been translated into almost 100 languages.
Stamps, starters and brushes are stored using popular open formats (PNG, SVG, Ogg Vorbis, etc.) allowing parents and teachers to create their own content for use at home or in the classroom - even using completely free tools.
The 'Tux Paint Config.' program allows parents, teachers, and school technicians to alter Tux Paint's behaviour using a simple, easy-to-use graphical interface.

Thinkfinity is a website that gathers thousands of free lesson plans, interactives, videos, learning games. A Professional Development community has developed around the activity and the material on the website as well as several blogs and a news service about education (also available in RSS feed).
Teaching and learning resources in Thinkfinity are provided by content partners (USA leading education organizations) go through an expert review to check that all the content is accurate, up-to-date, unbiased and appropriate for students.
The website provides a useful research tool to easily find specific resources sorting them by subject, type, keyword, grade level and partner.
Classroom-ready lesson plans and other online learning materials make it easy to integrate Verizon Thinkfinity into the classroom: from the primary source documents you can print for each student to the interactive games students can play in pairs or individually, the resources are rich and varied to meet any teaching style and need.
Members of the online (free) community are provided with tools to organize resources, to network with friends and other teachers and to share ideas, plans and advice with others in the education community.
The website is aimed at students, teachers, library media specialists, parents, afterschool program providers, homeschoolers and anyone interested in teaching and learning.

This website promotes the use of film in the language classroom, suggesting movies with age specifications, lesson plans, and including a film language glossary and film links to help both teachers and students.

The three main objectives of Film English are:
- promote the critical and creative use of film in the language classroom
- promote cineliteracy, the ability to read critically and evaluate moving images, in the language classroom.
- promote creativity amongst both teachers and students.

Mangahigh.com is one of the first games-based-learning sites, where students learn Mathematics via purpose-built casual games that balance fun and learning. It was founded by an experienced team of mathematicians and game specialists.
The games on this platform are adaptive (they dynamically adapt in difficulty to the ability of the student) and automatic (they have a meta-objective that the players strive to achieve by repeating a simple step (game mechanic) over and over again). They are designed to develop students' ability and curiosity to observe, hypothesize, test, evaluate, conclude and refine ideas. Finally, they provide powerful contexts often bringing out the 'real-world' application of the topic at hand, so increasing the students' interest in the content.
Games are structured with objectives: a bronze medal demonstrates a basic understanding of the key teaching objectives of the challenge. This includes a competence with typical/standard applications of the topic. A Silver and Gold medal demonstrate a secure understanding of the teaching objective and a competence with non typical/extension applications of the topic.
The educational content within Mangahigh is based on the national (UK) curriculum and is delivered through its proprietary educational games.
The site is targeted towards 7-16 year olds but is open for anyone to play. All available games are free to play and enable kids to to develop mathematical knowledge and skills in the context of total involvement. The games are grouped in numbers, algebra and shape and there is a section designed for younger children. There is also a quiz dedicated to the same topics mentioned above, with structured exercises.
Mangahigh also promote school-to-school bilateral competitions. The service is called Fai-To (read more about it on the website).

O2 Learn is a free, moderated video-sharing site for teachers to share their best lessons with secondary school students. The video library contains at present almost 1500 videos on various subjects (see table of content) and the number is constantly increasing as new videos are uploaded every week.
O2 Learn can give every 13-18 year old access to a huge choice of curriculum focused (UK) mini-lessons which can help them with revision or to catch up on some subjects that they can't remember or might have missed.
Students can rate the lessons: best lessons are awarded every week and every year as chosen by the student rating and an expert judging panel. To date, O2 Learn has awarded over £300,000 directly to teachers and schools in the UK. Find out more on our awards page.
In order to make the site safe and accurate, videos are moderated for appropriateness and the accuracy of the content through a network of 'learning champions'.
Teachers sharing content keep all rights in their content, can use it in any way, and can allow others to use it. By sharing the content on O2 Learn, they also give their unrestricted permission to use that content, free of charge, for the operation and promotion of the service.
The service is provided as a BETA service.

Shmoop is a free online platform containing over 1000 learning guides and test preparations written by educators and experts on a number of subjects (see table of content). It was created with the aim of improving learning tools by using an approach to education based on the keywords: relevant, real, approachable.
The learning guides are characterized by deep analysis of the topics, focusing questions, quotes and references to pop culture. Hypertext and multimedia play an important role in the guides as a way to provide students with an easier although richer learning possibility.
Shmoop holds itself to the highest academic standards and cites its sources so students borrowing ideas from it can (and indeed must) cite Shmoop in their work.
The content written primarily by Ph.D. and Masters students from top universities, like Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale. Most of the content is free to be read without logging in, but with a free account other tools such as Clippings and Stickies become available.
Top rated contents are available in Spanish too.
Premium service gives access to the other materials and tools provided by the platform such as the premium test prep courses for the SAT, ACT, SAT Subject Tests, and AP exams and the possibility to create classrooms where to invite students and monitor their progress through detailed real-time reports.

BibMe is a free automated citation creator and bibliography generator. It uses external databases to fill citation information: after that it compiles the bibliography and formats references following the guidelines specified by the most recent editions of each style guide. It is also possible to enter citations manually. A citation guided is also provided to students for them to learn about style guidelines for citing references.
BibMe provides with the possibility to save as many bibliographies as wanted and to access and edit them on the Web at any time. Bibliographies can be shared and downloaded in a .rtf file. It is also possible to assign categories and tags to individual citations in order to find them easily and filter citations across all compiled bibliographies.
It started in January 2007 as a student project with the aim to avoid passing hours on formatting bibliographies, thus saving time, better served working on the paper.

PrimaryPad is a web-based word processor that allows pupils and teachers to work together in real-time. It was conceived by a teacher and is specifically designed for schools.
Pads are collaborative. This means that more people can work on them at a time (indeed that’s the point of it) in order to get ideas, collaborate on a common task, share and quickly posting pieces of information when working in a group or collaborative environment.
PrimaryPad integrates other tools giving the possibility to write sticky notes, to draw, to chat with collaborators, to make templates, to upload and insert images and text from other documents, to use a time slider to go back in time in the edition of the pad to see what was there in a previous version, etc.
The free version of this tool allows to create an unlimited number of pads that last 30 days before being deleted and can be edited by up to 50 people.
The website also contains a library of ideas for teachers of any subject.