Learn To Use ICT & Multimedia Tools

Multimedia Training Videos is a series of completely free and open educational resources for learning a variety of multimedia and ICT tools.  It has been created by members of the MSc in Multimedia.

Sets of training videos are provided that take you through Flash, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Director, Audacity and HTML. Very useful for any web design class.

A set of Student Tools Videos is also provided although this could just as easily read 'Teacher Tools Videos'.  This section covers info links, second life, Delicious, mind mapping tools, searches, creating surveys, RSS and Blogger. Great for some professional development!

There is even a nice tutorial on using Twitter. A list of useful External Training Videos Links is also included.

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20 Free Interactive Multimedia Resources for Educators

Finding interactive multimedia resources online is a great way for educators to enhance teaching and learning in their classroom. From web apps to interactive whiteboard activities, the Internet is loaded with high quality resources that students will enjoy. Here is a list of 20 free resources for educators to try out this year:

TeacherLED - TeacherLED provides teaching resources for use with interactive whiteboards. The interactive whiteboard resources contained on this site are for math, English, and geography. Teachers can also find information on how to create their own interactive whiteboard resources.

Crickweb.co.uk - This free site offers 169 educational resources that educators can use with interactive whiteboards. Educators will also find 15 free games for kids between the ages of 4 and 11. The site also links to more than 100 other free resources online.

What2Learn - What2Learn offers free game-based learning for students. Teachers can also use this site to track progress, access more than 1,000 interactive resources, and create original games.

Interactives - Interactives offers free interactive games and activities that can be used by educators to enhance learning in the classroom. Interactives cover math, science, language, history, and art.

SMARTboard - SMARTboard provides several free online activities that educators can use with or without interactive whiteboards. The activities cover elementary, middle, and high school education.

BrainPop - The BrainPop educational site offers animated and interactive games that students can play online. There are games for science, social studies, English, math, arts, music, health, and technology. * Small selection of free content. Majority of content requires paid subscription. PD

FunSchool - FunSchool offers free online games for K-6 students. Throughout this site, educators will find hundreds of entertaining yet educational games sorted by grade level.

Visuwords - The Visuwords site is a free online interactive graphical dictionary and thesaurus. To use this site, simply type in a word to find a neural network of word associations and meanings.

FunBrain - Within the FunBrain site, educators can find dozens of interactive educational games that younger students will enjoy. The games help with math, reading, and other subjects.

BGFL - The BGFL site offers free online activities and games that can be used with an interactive whiteboard. Throughout this site, educators will find resources for foundation, primary, and secondary education for English, science, mathematics, and other subjects.

SimplyBox - SimplyBox is a free web app that gives you the capability to capture and organize sections of web pages. The web sections you collect are organized into boxes that can be easily shared with students or colleagues.

Rader's Numbernut.com - This all inclusive math warehouse offers free online activities that students of all ages can use to improve math skills. The activities can be used on your computer and also work well with interactive whiteboards.

ScribLink - ScribLink is a free online whiteboard that can be used to collaborate in real time with students and colleagues. With this site, you can draw, upload images, chat, voice conference, and transfer files.

PrimaryGames - This fun learning site features games for language arts, math, social studies, science, and more. The site was launched by a science and technology teacher who originally created the games for his own classroom.

eField Trips - eField Trips allows students to take virtual tours of exciting monuments and attractions around the United States. Each tour features a virtual experience, field journal, and "ask the expert" question and answer opportunities. To access the tours, you must sign up for a free account.

Tramline - This site is loaded with virtual tours and field trips that students can take to explore the world of science. The tours explore everything from ecosystems to prehistoric life.

Mathsframe.co.uk - Mathsframe offers several free math resources that teachers can use with interactive whiteboards. The resources cover calculating, counting and partitioning.

BookBuilder - With this site, you can create, publish, share, and read digital books to your students. BookBuilder is perfect for teachers who want to customize learning through original books that will interest students.

Classtools.net - Classtools.net offers free tools that teachers can use to create their own interactive games to embed into blogs, wikis, websites, and more.

Earthtrips - Earthtrips allows students to take a virtual tour into the history of the earth. In this virtual tour, students are presented with raw information so that they can study earth science as professionals.

My thanks to education writer Karen Schweitzer for this quest post. Karen is the About.com: Guide to Business School and she also writes reviews for OnlineCourses.

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Explore the World

Explore "makes documentary films and photographs to showcase extraordinary nonprofit efforts and leaders around the world" opening the door to a world you might otherwise never get to see, a world neglected by the mainstream media.

Tanzania, Ethiopia, Ghana, Sudan, Darfur, Rwanda, China, Tibet, India, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, The Vatican, The Arctic, Greenland, Costa Rica, Canada and many U.S. cities are all included.

Explore's film and images "document how people from all over the world, from every walk of life, are taking positive steps that have local impact and global relevance".

Many research articles and links to other relevant websites are also provided.

A great resource for travel and tourism students!!

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Technorati Tags: explore, tourism, travel

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Apture includes a Twitter Viewer

Apture, reviewed earlier, just keeps getting better and better and now includes a new Twitter Viewer that lets you embed the whole Twitter experience right on your website next to relevant content. 

Visitors to your site can view live Twitter streams without having to leave the page - pdonaghy's twitter. This also includes Twitter search results - mathematics search.

In fact, from within the Twitter Viewer, you can also view any multimedia content that people are twittering about - without leaving your page!

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Technorati Tags: apture, twitter

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Need to Know the Current Time?

If you ever need to know the current time, GMT that is, (also known as UTC) then just have a look at the NIST clock.

This public service is provided by the Time and Frequency Division of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It uses the national time scale UTC(NIST) as its time reference.

The NIST Clock is intended as a time-of-day service only and should not be used to measure frequency or time interval.

Interestingly, you can also download software from NIST to use the Internet to automatically set your computer clock to the correct time using the Internet Time Service.

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Technorati Tags: gmt, internet time

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Make your Webpages Come Alive

Apture provides "the first rich communication platform allowing publishers and bloggers to easily turn flat pages of text into multimedia experiences".

With Apture, it is really easy to add images, videos, audio files and wikipedia articles to your page.

Allow your readers/students to engage with all this multimedia without having to leave your webpage.

Apture does indeed "turn flat pages of text into a compelling multimedia experience". Just have a look at the next section, about Dublin, which contains links to all four types of media mentioned. First found reference to Apture on Kathy's blog.

Dublin or Baile Átha Cliath is the capital of Ireland and is situated on the East coast.

The city has a world-famous literary history, having produced many prominent literary figures, including Nobel laureates William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett plus Oscar Wilde and Jonathan Swift all come from Dublin. The city is also home to the creator of Dracula, Bram Stoker.

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Technorati Tags: apture, audio, multimedia, video, wikipedia

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Easy Authoring with Dragster

Dragster 2 is a simple tool for creating "sophisticated drag and drop image labeling and categorisation activities".

Many "innovative features and rich feedback" are also incorporated in Dragster 2.

This is a great little tool, which does exactly what it says on the box!

After creating your activity, you download the required files (zip file) to your PC.

You can then edit the resulting html code to adjust the look of the flash player to match the colour of your website.

The final version can then be installed on your web server or in your VLE. Have a look at the Earths Structure to see just how well it works.

Found this thanks to Stephen and Scott.

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Technorati Tags: dragster, quiz, vle

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Multimedia Masterpiece

Visiting Ashes and Snow is a captivating experience. This site demonstrates all that is good about multimedia.

Ashes and Snow combines compelling text, pictures, music, narration, video and flexible navigation to provide a truly memorable and individual experience. When visiting the site make sure you choose the "Enhanced Experience" option.

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Technorati Tags: ashes and snow, multimedia

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Online Goodies (4) - Scrapblog

Scrapblog will appeal to all those visually gifted bloggers who subscribe to the theory that 'a picture paints a thousand words'. A true multimedia treasure, Scrapblog allows you to combine text, photos, video and audio to create multimedia scrapbooks. As with all websharing sites there are many excellent examples on view providing ample inspiration - should you need it!

This site provides a relatively easy way to produce stunning educational multimedia content. Although audio can be added as a backing track, individual audio files cannot be added to the different pages - unlike the video files. But, it seems the video files can only be added from YouTube.

Once published, your completed scrapbook can be viewed online as a slideshow. The scrapbook may also be posted to Facebook or Flickr and then downloaded from there.

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Technorati Tags: audio, facebook, flickr, multimedia, photo, scrapblog, video, youtube

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