Bringing Multimedia to the K12 Classroom--Education Majors Take Note

"SchoolTube.com is the nation's largest K-12 moderated video sharing website that provides students and educators with a safe and FREE video sharing website that is exclusively endorsed by leading education associations."

Because it is moderated, it is a safe environment where materials made by and for students, organized into strands or channels, can be shared and used for educational purposes. In April, the site is asking for videos showing "what you and your club, school or community is doing to celebrate" Earth Day.

There are over a dozen professional organizations and companies serving as educational partners on the site. It has grown from its launch in 2006 to become the "largest teacher moderated video sharing website" in the United States.

Random House Children's Books provides a channel featuring video "book talks" and related resources to encourage reading in grades K-12.

"ScienceCinema" Search Tool from the U.S. Department of Energy

In February 2011, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) launched ScienceCinema, a new way to search DOE's extensive video resources.

Jeffrey Salmon, Deputy Director for Resource Management with the DOE Office of Science, said, "ScienceCinema's pioneering search and retrieval capability provides the public with a way to quickly access and view our multimedia-based R&D information."

You can search for specific words or phrases, then get results in the form of video snippets. The snippets have a media timeline indicating where in the video the terms were spoken.

ScienceCinema was developed by the DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) in partnership with Microsoft Research.

Geeky Fun--Online Collaborative Writing Tools

from http://foldingstory.com

I was trawling around on the “Geeky Fun” section of the MakeUseOf website the other day and found a list of “7 Collaborative Storytelling Websites to Weave Your Own Digital Stories” that I just have to share with you.  Collaborative writing is a modern, online prose version of group poetry, renga, and an updated version of the "exquisite corpse" method of group writing. 

Whether you are an experienced writer, just getting started, or simply like to read cool stuff that you’ve never seen in print before, these sites are for you:

1.       Folding Story—“writing game where each writer is constrained to write one line of a story (120 wrods or less) and pass it on…in just three minutes” 

2.       Ficly—“micro-fiction in a collaborative way”  

3.       Fabulate—“collaborative book project” with submissions maximum 500 words and each entry must pick up where the last left off and continue to build a cohesive end product 

4.       WikiStory—collaborative storytelling in all genres; check out the “three-word story” challenge 

5.       One Million Monkeys Typing—“each story has three possible paths” to which you may add your own snippet 

6.       StoryMash—“might appeal to amateur writers who want some of the spoils of their writing…site shares half of the advertizing revenue stories get with their writers;” chapter-length submissions and peer-review 

7.       Novlet—multiple languages; each story “is divided into passages” that you may continue or branch off in a new direction 

Internet Public Library logo (http://www.ipl.org/)

The Internet Public Library’s site offers a pathfinder page for more creative writing resources.