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

Julia Hum/Educreations

One of the biggest, fastest shifts in ed tech the last couple years has been the evolution from the use of large interactive whiteboards to the use of mobile, agile multi-purpose apps. Currently, there are at least six products, all competing to become teachers’ favorite. Replay Note, ScreenChomp, ShowMe, DoodleCast Pro, Knowmia, Explain Everything and Educreations all offer teachers the ability to record the visual and audio components of a “whiteboard” lesson on their iPads, and share it online.

Educreations is one of the top contenders, teachers say, mostly because of its simple user interface and multi-functionality. “I use it when I need to make quick videos in class,” said Ramsey Musallam, a high school chemistry teacher in San Francisco. Other features that teachers seem to love: the app offers more than one page for recording; the user can import images from other places and format them easily within the video; there’s a text feature so students don’t have to contend with messy teacher handwriting, and perhaps best of all, it can be used on desktop computers, not just an iPad.

One of the values educators look for in tech tools is student usability, and with Educreations, teachers say the tool is straightforward enough to incorporate into student work. Musallam says he always starts his class with a challenge question, which he solves in an Educreations video that he uploads to his website. There he keeps an archive of challenge problems that kids can look back on if they get stuck. He doesn’t give them the answer right away because he wants them to try working it out for themselves first. “Educreations allows me to dump direct instruction in little packets when they need them,” Musallam said.

He also has his students create inquiry videos where they pose a question for a peer to solve. Musallam actually prefers ScreenChomp for these because he has five classes of 30 students each using shared iPads off a school cart. He doesn’t want to deal with logging in and out of an Educreation account and ScreenChomp creates a random URL that the student can send to him.

Why inquiry videos? Students can release little bits of information along the way, mirroring the problem solving process.

“One of the problems with written textbooks is that kids get all the info right up front and that’s not how the problem solving process works,” Musallam said.

OTHER USES

Elementary school teachers are finding totally different uses for Educreations, many of which are student-based. Educators at a public elementary charter school in Altadena,Calif. have found the app useful for testing reading fluency. Sebastian Cognetta, the school’s director, says students record themselves reading, sometimes stopping to identify challenging words. Cognetta says teachers at his school use this method with kids who are slow to pick up reading because they can listen back to old recordings and mark their own improvement. He also noted that Educreations allows teachers to use the “work sample approach” with kids struggling in math. In the work sample approach a struggling student gets a fully solved problem that she has to explain. With Educreations the student records herself describing how to reach the correct answer, while taking notes on the problem itself.

Debbie Taylor, who teaches sixth grade math, science, health, and technology, said her students use the app for presentations — illustrations and their voice recordings to present keys ideas on Newton’s Laws of Motion, for example — and to create tutorials for their classmates.

She also uses the app a formative assessment choice. Through the class account, students demonstrate and explain a process or application, which she later reviews. “Being able to see their process and hear their thinking provides higher levels of analysis,” she wrote on a MindShift Facebook post.

Educreations works well for teachers who want to include some element of the “flipped classroom”approach. It’s also useful for educators who can create a video of an explanation once, rather than having to repeat it to every student individually. Teachers spend a lot of time before class, after class, between classes and at lunch helping students who come looking for one-on-one help with the same types of questions.

“If we don’t save teachers time then we don’t stand a chance at being adopted,” said Wade Roberts, one of the founders of Educreations. Roberts used to run a tutoring company in Atlanta before he got interested in the social app movement and designed the successful app Pieces of Flair for Facebook. But he never forgot his experience tutoring and wanted to find a way to combine his success in the programming world with his passion for education. When he looked at the ed-tech software on the market, he was disappointed. “It’s far too hard for the average teacher to be involved in this,” Roberts said. “If this is the future of learning there needs to be a platform for the average, non-tech savvy teacher to participate.”

Still, there are a lot of things that both Roberts and teachers would like to see improved on the app. For one, the whole video has to be made in one take – so no room for mistakes. Many people want an editing tool, as well as an erasure tool. Roberts says he hopes the app can become more interactive, integrating quiz questions into videos as they progress. He’d also like to provide some way for teachers to save templates for one another.

Ultimately, Roberts wants to create a huge repository of short education videos where kids can find any lesson from any teacher whenever he or she needs it. He doesn’t think that will make teaching or the learning irrelevant. “Just because the info is there and available doesn’t necessarily mean that grasping it will be unnecessary,” he said. No matter how many ways a student learns the material, the true test is whether he can solve the problem or explain the chemical reaction. There’s no substitute for that.

Adobe Rome

By Ifanyi Bell

Educators are an industrious bunch. On a day-to-day basis, they have to make something out of nothing, and that’s especially true when it comes to integrating technology in the classroom.

They’re faced with a slew of barriers preventing a full-scale upgrade of technology—namely funding and an ideological consensus regarding reform, among other challenges. Until those things are sorted, educators will continue to use the vast patchwork of software and hardware available to them from the highly competitive consumer technology market.

Unfortunately, there’s no centralized system — the patchwork is just that: a hodgepodge of technology available to some, but not all. Software will run on this computer, but not that one. This license can be applied to that desktop, but not that laptop. This app can be loaded on an Apple, but not a PC.

There may be some good news — at least in the media-making realm: Project Rome for Education, from Adobe, a suite of media making tools for classroom use, based on the design industry standard, Adobe Creative Suite (CS). Adobe has taken elements of its famous(ly expensive) media creation software (Photoshop, Illustrator, After-Effects, Premiere, etc.) and bundled it into an all-in-one kit for creating slideshows, digital stories, web-pages, presentations, and more.

Adobe recently released a preview of the software and its sibling, the “Educational Version,” which can be accessed through a web-based application, or a fully downloadable desktop app. Educators can develop and customize interactive quizzes and tests (exported as .swf files) to be taken on computers and have the option of facilitating lessons as a class, or assign work to individual students. Certainly a lot of potential here.

Will it solve the complicated issues associated with classroom technology integration? Certainly not. Could it help streamline the compatibility and accessibility issues associated with classroom media creation? Perhaps. With only the preview version of the software available for download, there is no official word on pricing, or even an official release date. The website is soliciting educators to enroll in a pilot testing program. When it does release, it will be available for Apple and PC with the option of running it completely from the Web.

As with most new technology that’s brought to the education realm, as important as the technology is the training component. The Adobe Creative Suite is a powerful and sophisticated set of tools, and since the developers have leaned very heavily on the the user elements from those products, I’m concerned that the learning curve will require more time that teachers have  to create truly polished lessons and projects, let alone facilitate the training process. If you or an educator has signed up for the pilot, let us know. We’d love to learn more.

[12/2/10 UPDATE: We recently received a message stating that the trial project for Project ROME for Education has concluded, and that no additional Project ROME software updates are planned at this time.]

Flickr: Frerieke

What if each student had her own teacher at school? Would she benefit from individual attention, progressing at her own pace, learning the way that best suited her? Clearly, it’s economically and physically impossible to provide each student a separate teacher, but technology can be a powerful tool in helping that process along.

In today’s Wall St. Journal, writer Barbara Martinez discusses how teachers are using laptops a few hours a day in the classroom to help kids learn to read at their own pace. What they call the “blended learning” approach allows students at P.S. 100 in the Bronx to combine online learning with traditional teaching techniques — with the educator taking the role of a facilitator — and is proving to show great results.

“The more motivated and interested they are, the better able they are to want to do their work,” said Sarah Kougemitros, a fourth-grade teacher at the school. She notes that the programs are full-fledged curriculums that come with great ideas for captivating student interest. For instance, her students are now enjoying the topic of chocolate, which includes fiction and nonfiction reading and writing online, as well as geography about the origins and manufacturing of cocoa beans.

Teachers can adjust the level of difficulty in reading groups: some kids can read on their own, while others have the books read to them as they follow along. For those who have difficulty reading, or have learning disabilities, this kind of individualized curriculum can engage them in the content without alienating them from the learning process.

In a similar example, 93% of one fourth-grade math class that used a blended online program in Texas met or exceeded standards, compared to 66% who passed in a class that didn’t use the program, the article says.

The Department of Education certainly sees this as a valid innovation to pursue: they’ve allotted $30 million in the next three years to take this blended learning program to 400 schools, according to the article.

And the trend grows:

The concept of blending an online learning environment with traditional teaching is growing in public schools. Across the country, an estimated 1 million elementary and high school students were engaged in online courses in 2007-08, up 47% from the year before, according to Anthony G. Picciano, a professor and executive officer of the Ph.D. program in urban education at the City University of New York.

Educators are finding their own ways of making it work. Teacher Jill White uses different types of videos to teach the same lesson to her students.

“I have the same video clip for bears on three computers. One computer will have an activity with creative writing, having the student pretend they are the bear on the video and writing about their adventure. The second computer will create a new undiscovered type of bear. The student will include a detailed picture and a description of the bear including feeding habits and their habitat. The third computer will have the student draw three different types of bears in the video with details including their habitat.”

Fourth-grade teacher Kevin Durden at Forest Lake Elementary School in South Carolina allows his students to use PowerPoint slide shows with videos, quizzes to test classmates, and comic strips to engage them in different ways.

“When I was student teaching in a more traditional environment, I felt that out of a class of 20 students, I was actually teaching maybe 12 of them,” he explains. “Now, with these new tools, I feel I’m teaching every single one of them.”

There are countless more similar innovations happening across the country. Are there any downsides to this? I haven’t found any yet, but I’ll be looking into it, and would like to hear from educators or parents who have any personal experience or thoughts on the matter.