learningIT

I have added a few videos under my ICT Theories and Info tab above recently that you may find interesting. One has taken inspiration from the CommonCraft team and created a video on Digital Storytelling in Plain English. Another is from Alan November (Myths and Opportunities: Technology in the Classroom) and finally, the lengthy Teaching Search in the Classroom from Google.

Other interesting reads from the web:

Michelle Obama tells International audience why the Arts Matter (from Los Angeles Times)

Schools Adopt Art as Building Block of Education (from The New York Times)

From Text on Paper to Media Collage – Art becomes the next R (from Jason Ohler via The Committed Sardine)

What’s new? 21st Century Skills (by Jamie McKenzie)

Media literacy skills have been important for decades as the news media transitioned into entertainment and a few international corporations consolidated control over information. While media literacy was important in the 1960s, it was sorely neglected. It may be even more crucial today but remains unattended by many school programs.

Digital Images for Education is “an unrivalled online image library, comprising over 500 hours of film and 56,000 photos, will be available free of charge for at least 25 years to UK higher and further education institutions from Summer 2010.”

From the Google Blog:

The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s; and the entire works left to the collection from LIFE photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Gjon Mili, and Nina Leen. These are just some of the things you’ll see in Google Image Search today.

We’re excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We’re digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos.