Media and Learning 2013

Knovio is an innovative tool for turning PowerPoint slides into rich video presentations with a web browser and webcam. The newly generated video and audio presentations can be accessed anytime on-demand and shared with others through email and social media. With this tool, users can take your existing PowerPoint slides and quickly and easily add their own video to synchronise with the slide content. They can then share this new presentation out to their intended audience by email or social media.
Currently Knovio is being offered free to any individual who wants to create and share video presentations with others. It is compatible with any of the leading Internet browsers you currently use to access the web (e.g., Firefox, IE, Chrome, and Safari).

Pixabay.com is a collaborative repository for quality public domain images. People can upload photographs or graphics to the website, and they will be screened to see if they are suitable for distribution. The images so uploaded will go under Creative Commons Deed CC0 into the public domain.
Although it is not possible to claim ownership of any image in its original state or license them granting exclusive rights as they are, it is possible to adapt and use the images also for commercial purposes without attributing the original author or source. For details about this, look the page of terms and conditions.

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.

Tiching is a free Spanish platform dedicated to education. It collects teaching resources and a social network has formed on top of this service. At present collected resources are more than 83000. The website is available in all official languages of Spain and in English. Tiching is aimed at the whole education community: teaching staff, students, families, publishers and anybody related in some way to the world of education.
Two search engines are provided. The internal one gives a number of options to refine researches, including language, skills, level of education, etc. The second search engine can be installed in external WordPress websites and blogs to perform searches in Tiching directly from there.
The social network has been designed for the education community and is formed by more than 25000 people collaborating from all over Spain.
There are many types of digital educational content in Tiching: activities tutorials, projects, teachers guides, etc. They are provided in many different formats such as video, text, image, interactive activity, etc.
Each content file contains:
• Basic information: title, description, image, tags, language, short URL, creator;
• Validation: it’s the internal validation process through which every resource passes when uploaded
• Thanks: it’s a feedback about the usefulness of a resource
• Save
• Comment
• Report

TeachersFirst is a free website for teachers that contains reviews of external resources as well as own original resources. All the resources are reviewed by teaching professionals with relevant experience. Reviews point out any safety or policy concerns for the tool and offer links to management tips for each concern. The own units and lessons have been developed for actual classrooms, in consultation with practicing professionals or by the teachers themselves.
TeachersFirst is written and edited entirely by experienced, professional educators.
Becoming a member gives access to many additional functions.
Some features:
- weekly update via email
- TeachersFirst Edge: reviews tools on the Edge, with specific ideas for using them safely and effectively in teaching and learning.
- TeachersFirst Exclusives include ready-to-go, projectable classroom activities, lesson and unit plans, special topic collections and professional pages.
- TeachersFirst’s Classroom Resources area includes over 12,000 educator-reviewed web resources ready to be used with students in the classroom.

Share My Lesson is a big web portal for high-quality teaching resources. Its database contains over 254.000 free teacher-created resources in a variety of formats (images, web pages, pdf’s, music, text files, etc.) for every level of education from kindergarten to high school and with a section for students with disabilities.
The portal provides an online community where teachers can collaborate with, encourage and inspire each other. The members of the community can download and share user-generated resources free of charge.

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.

Aviary is a free suite of online creative applications, from graphic design to audio editing, which can be used right in the web browser. The advanced suite includes:
- Phoenix, Image Editor
- Talon, Screen Capture
- Raven, Vector Editor
- Peacock, Effects Editor
- Roc, Music Creator
- Myna, Audio Editor
- Falcon, Image Markup
- toucan, Swatch Editor

"KQED Education Network engages with community and educational organisations to broaden and deepen the impact of KQED media to effect positive change"

The Education section gives more information on how to use media for education through:
* Featured Lesson Plan
* Examples of digital storytelling

And if you log in, you can access media resources for education.

On the Digital Storytelling section (http://dsi.kqed.org/index.php/inspirations) you can find out more about
* Annual Digital Storytelling Contest and Festival for high school students
* Featured Projects such as youth stories from South Africa created at the 5th World Summit on Media and Children.
image
* Digital Storytelling: Watch stories, explore narrative, investigate new technologies and check out resources that have to do with digital storytelling. Including Mobile Projects such as "'Scape the Hood", the first gps-enabled mobile media project:
"Scape the Hood was conceived and designed as a locative storytelling project for the Digital Storytelling Initiative at KQED for the opening of the 8th annual Digital Storytelling Festival. We convened a group of storytellers, artists, and technologists to envision what this project could be. It became a narrative archeology experiment, combining digital storytelling and emerging technology by overlaying a virtual landscape on the physical world. As originally designed, the audience walks the streets and listens to the neighbourhood stories, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells from both the physical and the virtual world."

Canal Educatif (“on demand educational channel”) is a collaborative web platform which offers a series of free and innovative educational videos connected to the high school level curriculum. Targeted at teachers, students and families, it is intended for after-school work by students, for use during class time and to foster discussion between different generations.

In French: "Canal Educatif est un project collaboratif visant à constituer le premier patrimoine de vidéos éducatives pour les jeunes et leurs parents à domicile. Enseignants, étudiant ou expert vous pouvez y participer et jouer les passeurs de culture."

An interview with Erwan Bomstein-Erb, founder and Director of Canal Educatif, is available as part of the MEDEA Showcase on Canal Educatif: http://www.medea-awards.com/canal-educatif. He states that he founded Canal Educatif, in order to dramatically improve the access of students to culture through web 2.0 technologies.