Media and Learning 2013

GCFLearnFree.org provides quality, innovative online learning opportunities to anyone who wants to improve their technology, literacy and math skills. Users can choose among over 1,000 free lessons including include video and interactive contents.

The Internet Archive is a vast non-profit digital library, founded in 1996 to build an Internet library. Its aim is to offer permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.
Now the portal’s collection includes a huge number of texts, audio, moving images, live music, software as well as archived web pages, and provides specialised services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other people with disabilities.
Currently the Archive contains
- Over 1.1 million videos
- Over 1.5 million audio recordings
- Over 4.4 million texts
- Over 114000 live music concerts

On this web portal users can find more than 170,000 how-to videos & articles from more than 17,000 specialised creators. They are organized in 35 vertical categories and 424 sub-categories. The how-to videos are specially categorised into four main categories: Lifestyle, Science and Tech, Arts, and Gaming.
The access to the contents does not require any subscription or login. Nevertheless, by making an account (signing up is free) users are able to "follow" various subcategories of DIY topics they may want to learn more about.
There is an evaluation system in place, based on user-generated feedback: users can give "kudos" to videos that they find helpful.

IrfanView is a fast, small, innovative freeware graphic viewer that can be also used for editing. It is intended as free only for private, non-commercial and/or educational use (schools, universities and libraries) and for use in charity or humanitarian organisations.
The software is currently supported and a list of recent changes can be seen on the website. A FAQ page quite rich of useful information is also provided on the website.
Some IrfanView features:
• Many supported file formats
• Multi language support
• Thumbnail/preview option
• Paint option - to draw lines, circles, arrows, straighten image etc.
• Toolbar skins option
• Slideshow (save slideshow as EXE/SCR or burn it to CD)
• Show EXIF/IPTC/Comment text in Slideshow/Fullscreen etc.
• Support for Adobe Photoshop Filters
• Fast directory view (moving through directory)
• Batch conversion (with advanced image processing)
• Multipage TIF editing
• File search
• Email option
• Multimedia player
• Print option
• Support for embedded color profiles in JPG/TIF
• Change color depth
• Scan (batch scan) support
• Cut/crop
• Add overlay text/image (watermark)
• IPTC editing
• Effects (Sharpen, Blur, Adobe 8BF, Filter Factory, Filters Unlimited, etc.)
• Screen Capturing
• Extract icons from EXE/DLL/ICLs
• Lossless JPG rotation
• Unicode support
• Hotkeys
• Command line options
• PlugIns

Language support can vary with the version. The current version supports the languages listed aside. English is anyway always supported.

This e-book explains digital storytelling and includes tutorials to implement available online tools for digital storytelling and resources through step-by-step tutorials. This e-book is licensed under Creative Commons, and the author's blog lists many more useful resources, downloadable how-to-guides and interesting blog posts: http://langwitches.org/

In this online article "How to edit a film in a good way?", Jamie Biesemans explains what you need to do to edit a recording. In a down-to-earth way he bundles helpful tips as well as things to avoid when it comes to software, adding transitions, transition effects, soundtracks, and so on.

Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create animations, interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art. The outcomes can be stored and shared on the web within the Scratch system.
It is not only an ideal tool for the creation of simple and attractive interactive and/or animated learning objects, but it also serves as a learning instrument for young people. By using Scratch learners learn not only to create and share Scratch outcomes but more importantly they learn mathematical, logical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.
Scratch is at first sight a bit difficult to learn, but there is a (short and simple) manual that helps everyone getting started within minutes. It is not a full blown animation tool but it is a lot of fun and very rewarding to work with.
Scratch is developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, with financial support from the National Science Foundation, Microsoft, Intel Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Google, Iomega and MIT Media Lab research consortia.

Adobe eLearning Suite 2.5 software combines a whole series of Adobe topsellers into one integrated suite of resources, designed to take the hassle out of media integration for the digital course creator. It is a complete toolbox for creating and authoring professional eLearning courseware content end to end, including tools for application simulation, digital imaging, rich animations, audio production, and authoring of HTML or PDF content. the Suite also allows to accelerate development with rapid prototyping, out-of-the-box assets, and roundtripping workflows, publish to SCORM- and AICC-compliant Learning Management Systems and track SWF-, PDF-, or HTML-based content effortlessly, without programming.

lynda.com is a online training library with a lot of tutorials that can be browsed by subject (3D + Animation, Audio, Business, design, Developer, Home Computing, Photography, Video, Web + Interactive, Documentaries), by software and by author.

Pivot Stickfigure Animator is a software that allows you to create stick figure animations easily and without artistic skills.
You can move the sections of the sick figure and easily create a chain of animation frames that can be previewed as you go. You can use more than one stick-figure in the animation, and even create your own stick figures using an easy to use visual editor that lets you assemble objects out of lines and circles. In addition, you can optionally set animation size, speed and more. The result can be saved as animated GIF file.