Paul Salopek and Ahmed Kabil

Writing will always be important, but weaving text, images, sound, and presentation together can give students more and different ways to express themselves. Easy-to-use online tools allow students the opportunity to create multimedia projects that demonstrate knowledge and develop useful skills. Check out these new three tools on the scene.

MEOGRAPH

Launched less than a year ago, Meograph lets users create professional-looking multimedia presentations using video, audio, images, text, timelines, maps, and links.

Users create Meograph “moments” by uploading photos, videos, text and add voice narration to accompany the visuals. The moments can also be tagged with location, date, and time. Once all the moments have been collected, they can be shared through social media sites or embedded into websites.

First used by news outlets to tell stories using multimedia, Meograph is now being leveraged by teachers and students, too. The company is now offering tools specifically requested by teachers, with paid license fees. The one-year licenses, which cost $19.99, $29.99 and $39.99, are offered at three levels with different features, including the ability to add sub-accounts under the teacher’s name to protect student privacy. With the sub-account feature, students under the age of 13 can sign up.

The new licenses also provide more subtlety in the privacy of publishing. For example, in the most basic version, a project is either private or public. In the licensed version, a student can publish a project so only a teacher can see it. Meograph has also made it possible for groups to store work in the same place.

Here’s an example of a Meograph that students produced on the water cycle.

ZEEGA

Zeega allows users to create an interactive web-based story, pulling content from online sources, including photos, music, animated GIFs, and videos. Once a project is completed, viewers click their way through each story, one webpage leading to another, whether it’s a series of GIFs, or captioned photos, or just plain text. 

Jesse Shapins, the company’s CEO, teaches at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, so word is getting out in higher education circles, but it’s slowly reaching K-12 educators too.

The tool is free to individual users and will stay that way, according to Shapins. Zeega is still considering whether to charge larger scale publishers — like media organizations — a licensing fee.

WEVIDEO

WeVideo is primarily a video tool, allowing users to upload media clips, move them around easily, and edit them. What makes this tool unique is the ability for several people to collaborate at the same time. Users can choose from themes that give videos different moods, similar to settings on Instagram. One very handy feature is WeVidoeo’s Google Drive App, which allows users to store projects in Google Drive.

While there is a free version of WeVideo, the prices rise steeply for licenses that let users do more. The free version only allows for five gigabytes of storage and fifteen minutes of exported video. Also, the company’s watermark appears on the video. For $49.99 a year the watermark goes away and users get more of everything. And for $99.99 per year a user can make bigger and better projects, with more collaborators and better image resolution.

Matthew Williams/KQED Education

Henry Jenkins

In a traditional English class, a teacher might assign Herman Melville’s famous novel Moby Dick in small chunks. Students might complete their reading (or not), discuss major themes and perhaps write an essay at the end of the unit. But if a student never gets past the first few pages, the rest of that unit is lost.

It’s become a common refrain that traditional education isn’t serving a generation of students whose lives outside of school are completely disconnected from what happens inside. But there are plenty of teachers working hard to make reading material relevant to students, including a team of researchers from University of Southern California Annenberg’s Innovation Lab that includes Henry Jenkins and Erin Reilly. They’ve created a model of what they call participatory learning that engages students with materials on a personal level, often by incorporating different types of media into the classroom and offering varying points of entry to a text. Most recently, the team has put together a teacher’s strategy guide, Reading in a Participatory Culture: Remixing Moby-Dick in the English, Classroom and an interactive digital book, Flows of Reading, to provide models of their approach.

Moby Dick is a notoriously difficult book. “This book defeated me as an Advanced Placement kid,” Henry Jenkins said. He remembers hating the book, gritting his teeth to get through it and writing the worst essay of his high school career. That’s why he was so impressed by the work of the playwright Ricardo Pitts-Wiley who was teaching Moby Dick to incarcerated youth in Rhode Island, many of whom read below grade level.

Pitts-Wiley asked his students to reinterpret the novel in the context of their own lives. In their retelling Captain Ahab became a powerful drug dealer trying to avenge the death of his loved ones. His drug crew is forced to decide how far they’ll go for their charismatic leader. Together with his students Pitts-Wiley turned their re-interpretation into a play: Moby Dick: Then and Now. The students understood the themes when placed into familiar context and related to the character’s struggles when the story was no longer placed in an era and industry unfamiliar to them.

[RELATED READING: How Can Teachers Prepare Kids for a Connected World?]

Pitts-Wiley’s work correlates strongly to the research Jenkins has been doing on weaving more varieties of media into the classroom in order to make the learning experience more participatory, creative, multidisciplinary, and therefore meaningful to students. He teamed up with Wyn Kelley a Melville scholar from MIT, and a team of educational experts to design a curriculum around Moby Dick that would build in remixing, reinterpretation, and multimedia elements. They tested their new curriculum in six different schools.

“We want to raise a generation of kids who have a mouse in one hand and a book in the other,” said Jenkins. To do that the curriculum focuses on Melville as a master mash-up artist of 19th century culture; his book includes Shakespeare plays, the Bible, whaling culture and more. From there, the door is open for classes to discuss how remixed elements are allusions and what happens to a text when an author incorporates the work of others.

“Culture matters, history matters, the goal is to foster old fashioned close reading,” Jenkins said. A typical assignment might ask students to take one page of Moby Dick, highlight words they don’t know, define terms, draw pictures and share with one another. The idea is to focus closely in order to incite curiosity about the whole. And to let students creatively express their opinions and thoughts about the book, hopefully with a better understanding of what their own remixing might add to the broader cultural body of work around Moby Dick.

If this sounds a little messy and confusing – it is. That was the feedback teachers gave Jenkins’ team when they piloted these participatory learning strategies in the classroom. Teacher’s felt uncertain whether learning was taking place in this non-linear style. One teacher came to realize that if a student could get a purchase on the text anywhere, they understood how much more there is to learn about the book.

“That’s a different kind of learning outcome than we usually get when we convince people they’ve exhausted a book, that they’ve gotten it, when they’ve only touched it superficially,” Jenkins said. He sees the goal as both teaching something about Moby Dick in the moment as well as fostering a community of readers who know that reading Melville in high school English doesn’t mean they’ve conquered it.

[RELATED READING: How Do We Define and Measure 'Deeper Learning'?]

“We may be romanticizing what people got out of Moby Dick in the traditional classroom,” Jenkins said. “This is just taking ownership over that and allowing students to pursue their passion and interests.” Piloting this curriculum Jenkins’ team found that it worked less effectively when teachers used it more traditionally. “The closer we got to traditional school, the more they shut down,” Jenkins said. “No curriculum is idiot proof. You have to get teachers who understand the participatory mindset.”

The other part of the project, Flows of Reading, helps encourage participation around literature and models an expanded approach to literacy and the reading and writing that make up the discipline. The digital book allows readers to follow hyperlinks, enjoy embedded video content, and add to an online space for related work. It broadens the model beyond Moby Dick and applies it to reading at all age levels from a wordless picture book to the Hunger Games and Lord of the Rings. It offers four pathways or ways to view a text.

Henry Jenkins

MOTIVES FOR READING
This pathway and assorted material address the idea that people read various kinds of textual content for all kinds of reasons. Reading a website may be different from reading a book, but they both require literacy and are appropriate at different points. This pathway explores how seemingly different kinds of reading might be more akin than they seem.

ADAPTATION AND REMIXING
While the book encourages students to elaborate and create material based on parts of a text that speak to them, this section also discusses appropriate and respectful adaptation and remixing. It brings in the ethics of attribution and fair use.

NEGOTIATING CULTURAL SPACES
This pathway discusses the various identities that each person brings to reading whether it is gender, ethnicity, specific experiences or anything else that shapes the reading process.

CONTINUITIES AND SPACES
These are “the spaces where your imagination can go wild,” said Erin Reilly, who led the effort to create Flows. This pathway explores how to creatively share stories and layer upon the original.

Throughout the research and implementation of this project Jenkins and Reilly knew they’d need to think about assessment. They brought in Dan Hickey from Indiana University to help develop assessments that are immediate and happen as part of the learning process. The state standards are a minimum, Reilly and Jenkins maintain should be easy to reach if students are engaged. They insist that learning activities should be open and free — a space for creativity; the reflection on that activity and how it ties back to the text is an area for worthwhile assessment.

Getty

Mobile phones, the Internet, and video games might be growing in popularity with kids, but according to one report, the trusty television is still the predominant media of choice.

“Even as technology evolves and young children increasingly turn to games and mobile media, they still love television best.” The statement comes from “Always Connected,” a recent report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, which reviewed seven recent studies (some of them never before released), and provides a comprehensive look at the implications of media exposure and use.

Kids age 8-10 watch 3.5 hours of television everyday. “Although computer and Internet use are rising, they are still just a fraction of children’s overall media use, and nowhere near the amount of time spent with television.”

In one example illustrated in the report, an 8-year-old named Gabriela watches Disney shows after school for 45 minutes, works on her homework while watching “Oprah,” and after dinner, watches the Discovery Channel and other shows with her parents, easily adding up to three or more hours per day.

I asked the authors of the study, Dr. Lori Takeuchi, Dr. Jennifer Kotler, along with the center’s executive director Dr. Michael Levine, some questions to help put the study into context.

Q. What’s the implication of children ages 8-10 spending 3.5 hours watching TV everyday? How is watching television different from playing games online, whether on a laptop or on a mobile device?

A. It depends. The jury is still largely out about whether interactive game play is better than TV or vice versa. One could argue that the interactivity that these newer formats offer are “better” for kids than the lean-back nature of TV watching. Research has shown that both TV and video can provide experiences that are educational as well as harmful depending on the kind of content to which children have been exposed.

Kids are certainly better off watching high-quality, educational TV shows than playing video games that are either age inappropriate or which offer no educational value. The research on the educational benefits of video games is beginning to build, but risks are still well described in the research literature, especially around violent content. Intriguingly even some of the offensive play mechanics associated with some video games may be able to be turned around if placed in the right context. Recent research by neuroscientists such as Dr. Daphne Bevalier at the University of Rochester has shown that playing first-person shooter games can improve players’ number sense (and consequently mathematical achievement). Others have shown that online multi-player games like World of Warcraft can improve teamwork and collaboration skills. And a study by the Mayo Clinic demonstrated the benefits of playing physical action games such as Dance Dance Revolution in developing healthy exercise habits for kids. Much of this research, however has been conducted on older players (teens and older), so we’re not certain if the same benefits will hold true with younger children. For a good review of the research on games, learning and health habits, readers might wish to read the Center’s report, Game Changer.

Q. Why do you think kids 2 – 5 years old watch more TV than 6 – 11 year olds?

A. Younger children spend more time with television for the simple reason that they spend less time in school. Younger kids haven’t yet developed the cognitive and physical capacities to interact with or manipulate what are, in essence, representational worlds. Simply watching these representational worlds is easier. Another reason younger kids aren’t playing video games is because parents are more closely regulating their media consumption.  They may worry more about little fingers breaking mobile devices/laptops than TV sets. Or believe that video games just aren’t appropriate for their very young children.

Q. How does children’s media consumption change around age 8?

A. The developmental readiness factor described above is responsive to this shift in media consumption. The new focus is also influenced by peer interactions inside schools and by parents’ loosening of the controls on the more sophisticated and costly technologies that allow independent game play and early use of mobile devices.

Q. Do you think this will change once younger kids spend more time with mobile games?

In the next few years, our trends data and that of other researchers indicates that more young children will be likely spending more time with interactive media at younger ages. There will however continue to be developmental and parental factors that make it less likely to ever rival the kind of use of older children. But who knows: one day children might literally be wired for learning from birth.

Q. When we talk about kids using 8 hours of media everyday, should all media be clumped into one category?

A. No, it is useful to break out the categories of media consumption just as the Kaiser Family Foundation and the recent Cooney Center/Sesame Workshop study did. That way we have a more fine grained sense of which types of media are gaining currency and which types of media multitasking behaviors are underway. For example listening to an iPod while playing a videogame is a different experience from watching television while surfing the internet.

Q. Which specific apps or media do you recommend for parents who want to interact with kids while they’re using media?

We don’t recommend specific apps that promote “coviewing” among kids and adults, but tablets such as iPads do appear to hold potential as an intergenerational learning platform given the ease with which kids and parents can mutually view and interact on them. iPad apps that are like board games look especially promising, as do electronic books that come on this format. TV console-based games such the Wii and other gesture-based systems such as the Kinect game system are also appealing to both generations. However there’s a need for more games that are both educational and possess intergenerational appeal — like Sesame Street the TV show!

FLickr:Christopher Frier Brown

The effects of multitasking on the brain and the way we’re wired has been the subject of countless studies, radio shows, and articles. But a new study soon to be released explores the social and emotional effects of media multitasking on kids.

Stanford professor Roy Pea presented some intriguing findings of a survey at the Digital Media & Learning Conference. Pea and his colleague Cliff Nass surveyed more than 3,400 girls age 8 to 12 — a “key period for social-emotional development” — examining how “video use and media multitasking correlates with … social well being and friendship.”

In other words, how does all this media use affect how kids feel?

Here’s what Pea presented at the conference.

The survey, which reached out to readers of Discovery Girls Magazine from across the country — all of whom had Web access — most of them at home — explored the social and emotional issues that come up while they’re media multitasking. Some of the criteria: age, access or ownership of technology, relationship with friends who their parents think are bad influences, amount of sleep, what media they consume, what media they engage in while using other media, and their general social outlook.

In terms of media activities, the survey examined watching videos, listening to music, reading or doing homework, emailing or sending messages, posting on Facebook, texting or instant-messaging, talking on the phone or video chatting, as well as the great old medium of face-to-face conversation (which is now considered a medium).

The survey asked questions about how many hours per average day the respondent participates in one of those media, whether they engage in different media at the same time, and how they feel while they’re engaging in each of these medium about the number of friends they have, their feelings of normalcy, whether they sense peer pressure, and how much sleep they get.

That their average media use per day is 6.9 hours is not surprising.

What is interesting, though, is the correlation between watching video and listening to music and the girls’ emotional disposition. According to Pea, the girls felt worse — less social success, less feelings of normalcy, and more exposure to friend their parents think are bad influences — while they were “using” video and music. And the same negative outcomes applied to when they were media multi-tasking.

On the other hand, they felt better — greater social success, more feelings of normalcy, less peer pressure — when they had face-to-face interactions.

And here’s where it gets to be what Pea referred to as a “mixed bag”: non-face-to-face social interactions — talking on the phone and interacting online — was associated with more peer pressure, but at the same time, with greater social success.

Pea pointed out that the study is limited in some ways. It could be that there are “strong negative correlations for video use and positive social feelings, but we can’t conclude that watching high volumes of video is responsible for the situation,” he said. “It could be that due to low positive social feelings, loneliness, awkwardness, alienation, participants turn to video watching instead of face-to-face interaction. And we don’t know the content of video use.”

Pea added that though this is the first study of its kind, they’re only “scratching the surface,” and that more longitudinal and intervention studies are needed. Studies about media production and engagement — not just consumption — will help complete the picture.

These studies can help parents understand the impact of media use and the social well-being of their kids. “[Kids] are making these choices largely on their own,” he said. “And parents have little say other than casual observations or asking children about their choices.”

I look forward to reading more about the study.

Flickr: Listen Up!

By Sara Bernard

Over the past five years, more than 27,000 students from Australia to Senegal to San Francisco have made films and other media about a wide range of subjects — from young refugees, to how to improve public education in the U.S., to environmental preservation, racial and gender discrimination, and more. They’ve produced their work in and outside of school and have taken it to festivals like Cinequest and Sundance.

The common thread with all these projects is Adobe Youth Voices (AYV), which is part of the Adobe Foundation. As a non-profit arm of a for-profit company, AYV supports  youth media and education organizations (including Listen Up!, the Bay Area Video Coalition, Reel Works, Radio Rookies, iEARN, and the Intel Computer Clubhouse Network) by providing grants, collaborative partnerships, professional development, tech tools and resources, and a worldwide network of teachers, students, and professionals making media together.

The premise behind the program: Media-making enables students to express themselves, address important global issues, and — as they’re using the latest technology to work on community-based projects, still a rare breed in most classrooms – to “bridge that gap between school and what’s going to happen when they leave school,” says AYV program manager Patricia Cogley.

The National Youth Listening Tour, for instance, is a program sponsored by the Department of Education to help reduce dropout rates and improve public education through youth input, and AYV student media will be featured in Boston, Seattle, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Project VoiceScape is a new partnership between Adobe Youth Voices, the PBS Foundation, and PBS’ POV that pairs young people with award-winning documentary filmmakers to help mentor emerging artists and showcase their work at festivals nationwide.

And through a partnership with DonorsChoose.org, anyone can help support specific school projects such as “What Matters Most: Kids Find Their Voice Using Technology,” a multimedia project for fourth and fifth graders in Seattle, WA.

While most of the work AYV does is through partnerships with other foundations or media organizations, interested teachers and project leaders can now access AYV Essentials: free curricula, lesson plans, student stories, and other resources that AYV staff have combed through and tagged as particularly successful.

AYV’s aim is not “to convince everyone to be media-makers,” though, says Cogley. “It’s about engagement. Young people who identify that they have a story to tell or a message to give to a community experience a real boost in self-esteem. They start to see that their opinion matters.”

(Check here for a recent round table discussion with AYV senior manager Miguel Salinas and lead educator Gregg Witkin about 21st century learning and arts education on KQED’s Forum).