Media and Learning 2013

Dictionary.com provides several products for reliable, free access to millions of English definitions, synonyms, spelling, audio pronunciations, example sentences, translations, example sentences, word games and study games. They are available online or through mobile applications.
Here follows a short description of the main products:
Dictionary.com: provides reliable access to millions of English definitions and meanings, spelling, audio pronunciations, example sentences, and word origins.
Thesaurus.com: is a comprehensive and efficient language tool used by professionals, students, etc., to find the synonyms and antonyms.
Quotes: offers over 60,000 famous quotations, aphorisms, proverbs, and quips. The quotes can be organized by topic, author, and popularity,
Reference.com: provides free online encyclopedia and library information.
Translator: it provides translations in more than 50 languages (in the style of Google Translate) . The number of characters is limited for each translation.
Spanish: a recently-launched product for learning Spanish at many levels. Pronunciation is still done by an automated reader with English setting up.
Word of the Day: it sends a daily email with a word to learn and its definition, selected to enrich the lexicon of the users.
The Hot Word Blog: it examines the terms tossed about around the world and draws meaning from news-making events.
Games: designed to entertain and educate. There is a variety of them on the platform.

This webpage gathers the recording and presentations of the webinar 'How to integrate gaming in the classroom' that took place on 25 June 2012. 27 participants took part in this one-hour webinar and received an insight into what it's like to integrate games into their teaching practice.

Speaker Steven Ronsijn, who is teacher and educational ICT-coordinator at Sint-Lievenscollege Gent (Belgium), described the concrete benefits and experiences he has had as a teacher when using games in his lessons. Jolanta Galecka from Young Digital Planet (Poland) focussed on how you can use games in different learning settings to better motivate children to learn from both a theoretical and a practical perspective.

This webinar was organised by the MEDEAnet project, which aims to promote media-based learning to organisations and practitioners and is related to the MEDEA Awards.

Voxy is a language-learning program based on real-life daily activities. Based on leading language learning principles and the latest technology, the integrated Web and mobile platform accelerates learning and creates a highly effective, immersive experience. Location-based language lessons and camera flashcards help learners with useful vocabulary and expressions in context.
The program provides authentic material for homework assignments, including built-in reading comprehension and vocabulary building tools. Lessons are designed in bite-sized increments for maximum compliance with assignments.
The program creates many opportunities for students to collaborate and learn together for it encourages group work and collaboration. Interactive games make language learning fun and keep students coming back for more. It also allows teachers to monitor students’ engagement, success and performance with easy-to-use reporting.
Voxy’s integrated web/mobile/SMS platform uses relevant up-to-date real-world content of a student’s choosing to shape lessons that are accessible anywhere, anytime. This approach is based on the pedagogic theories of motivation and learning. The used method increases frequency of study and accelerates learning by teaching in-context. The system on which the program is based is interactive and adaptive, meaning that each learner can personalize his/her curriculum.
Voxy is currently focused on teaching English to native Spanish and Portuguese-speakers. An expansion for speakers of other languages is planned.

Interactive Sites for Education is a website that groups together tens of different K-5 online interactive educational games and simulations for many school subjects such as Math, Language Arts, Science, Social Studies and Music. Each of these sections contains a number of subcategories. Each subcategory directly shows the linked snapshot of external websites. No review, evaluation or other type of data are available. The linked games are generally very entertaining and engaging. It is also possible to suggest new games.
The two sections “Art” and “Teacher Tools” are presently empty: content will be uploaded soon.
Other games can be found in the sections dedicated to Typing, Holidays and Brainteasers.

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.

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).

JogNog is a competitive quiz game for students in grades 2 – 12. Over 40,000 educator-created review questions are built on state and national (USA) curriculum standards.
JogNog quiz games are in multiple-choice format—just like standardized tests. To complete any level, the student must score 80% or higher. Missed questions are repeatedly re-presented until the student answers correctly. Educational areas are organized into: English, Math, Science and Social Studies.
On the website it is possible to play JogNog quiz games for free as a trial and the website maintains memory of the played quizzes as long as the connection lasts.
It is also possible to buy the quizzes and using the Design feature, teachers can create their own personalized quiz towers based on the class textbooks and reading materials. Teachers and students can also customize existing quiz towers using the Quick Quiz feature, as well as create personal quizzes.
The JogNog quiz game provides testing, design, and reporting features which offer teacher, parents, and students a robust and valuable educational tool. Reports provide teachers and parents with detail about students’ strengths and weaknesses. Class tools exist for teachers to easily track students’ progress.
Students can now use JogNog Mobile on Apple and Android devices.

Teach your Monster to Read is a free game to practise the first steps of reading. It is built on the principles of synthetic phonics and follows the teaching sequence of the Letters and Sounds programme.
Teach Your Monster to Read is intended to be used by teachers and parents/guardians as a reading-related teaching tool for children of between 3 and 8 years of age.
Teachers and parents may register on the site, and as a result become “Users”. Users may set up individual accounts for their Students, which allow the Students to access, and the User to track Students’ performance in their use of, the Game Service. Accounts may only be established by Users, and not by Students themselves; Students must have Users’ permission to use the Game Service.
On the How It Works Page, you can find links to how the game has been conceived and used in schools.
http://www.teachyourmonstertoread.com/how-it-works

ABCya.com is a platform for free educational kids computer games and activities for elementary students to learn on the web. All children's educational computer activities were created or approved by certified school teachers. All educational games are free and are modeled from primary grade lessons and enhanced to provide an interactive way for children to learn.
Grade level lessons incorporate areas such as math and language arts while introducing basic computer skills. Many of the kindergarten and first grade activities are equipped with sound to enhance understanding.

Joannis-Sajnovics is a Facebook page managed by Ágota Lang, a physics high school teacher in Sopron (Hungary), and her students. It is set up as Joannis-Sajnovics' diary so we can relive his travels in the 18th century from Hungary to Finland to observe the Transit of Venus - when Venus passes in front of the Sun as seen from the Earth. Posts are published as if by Joannis-Sajnovics himself, just like a travel journal.
Ágota and her students are also making an online game, the Hell Game, which will be available soon.

More information on the Transit of Venus, which will occur again in June 2012 and will be the last visible to people of our time, can be found on the Vimeo channel "Our last Transit of Venus": http://vimeo.com/channels/ourlasttransitofvenus. Videos on this channel include a teaser for a documentary film, presentations by leading scientists and outreach people from Europe and the US, as well as videos made by the students from the Széchenyi István Gimnázium (Sopron, Hungary, project co-funded by the European Planetology Network).