The new multimedia, multilingual portal reaches back to the early 1900s and offers free online access to videos, stills, texts and audio from European broadcasters and audiovisual archives.

The About page describes the need for this collaborative project:

Although audiovisual content is now being digitised and some of it is already available online, access to audiovisual archives, television in particular, remains fractured and scattered. EUscreen has developed a content selection policy and metadata framework that aligns the heterogeneous collections held throughout Europe and encourages the exploration of Europe’s rich and diverse cultural history and European television history in particular. As one of the main audiovisual content aggregators for Europeana, EUscreen and its collection is also connected to an online collection of millions of digitized items from European museums, libraries and archives.

Users may search the 30,000 items of programme content by genre, language, decades or providers, and topics, which include:

• Arts and culture
• Being European
• Disasters
• Education
• Environment and Nature
• Health
• History of European Television
• Lifestyle and consumerism
• National holidays, festivals, anniversaries and annual events
• Politics and Economics
• Religion and belief
• Society and social issues
• Special Collections
• The media
• Transportation, science and technology
• Wars and conflict
• Work and production

An advanced search screen offers even more filter options.

Our Picture Book activity asked learners to:

• Select a book in your first language using one of the sites listed below
• Read the book
• Using the interactive whiteboard, read the book (or a 10 minute passage if it is longer) to the class in your first language
• Retell the story to the class in English
• Share with the class: What about the story is special or unique to your culture or to your language?

My student teacher Kathie and I were hoping for having some fun while practicing reading and speaking fluency. We were also hoping for some cultural sharing.

We introduced several picture book portals.

Of course we pointed them to the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL).

The ICDL is a research project funded primarily by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and Microsoft Research to create a digital library of outstanding children’s books from all over the world. Rich with content, it’s a beautiful portal offering flexibility in search and reading options. It’s really the mother lode. Users can search by language, genre, reading level and keywords. Books are currently available in 61 languages, with many books available both in the original language and its English translation.

While these next portals do not compare in scope and features, we made them available to the students:

Big Universe Learning offers thousands of books–fiction, nonfiction, chapter books, foreign language titles–contributed by both publishers and members in 15 languages.  Some books have read aloud features.  The site also encourages student writing and publishing and the sharing of books and shelves.

Children’s Books Online from the Rosetta Project, offers antique books online in 41 languages. The titles, primarily western stories like The Ugly Duckling and Little Bo Peep, have been translated by volunteers. Select a book, and the languages available appear below the book.

Children’s Books Forever, offers picture books written and illustrated by Hans Wilhelm online in 12 languages.

The students urged us to add Yes24.com, what they called the Korean Amazon.com, offering books, eBooks, DVDs and general merchandise from Ugg boots to office chairs available for online purchase. (The site is completely in Korean.)

What we discovered:

It’s kinda easy to find stories written in French and Spanish and Chinese.

But, despite the international bounty–and they absolutely loved the International Children’s Digital Library–our students from Tibet, Ukraine, and Korea were a little disappointed. While they found a number of books translated into their first languages, few of the picture books they discovered were actually stories from their own cultures.  And June insisted on finding that famous Korean tale of the dutiful daughter and her blind father.

I explained that however rich these portals might be, they can only offer what authors and publishers make available to share.

And, this led us into a very rich exploration of the wonders of interlibrary loan, where we could order books from nearly any Pennsylvania library.  Searching the ACCESS PA portal, the students recognized so many of the titles they remembered from their childhood.  And we did find that famous Korean tale of the dutiful daughter and her blind father.

While they won’t be able to share those titles on our IWB, the combination of all these resources made everyone happy.

Another discovery, very few of these new students have basic library skills.  So, coming soon, the STHS ESL library skills Olympics!  We’ll be sure to report on the events.

I had a wonderful chat with the co-founders of instaGrok, a new search tool designed to help users learn about a topic by facilitating the finding of context and educational content. Still in Beta, InstaGrok is nurtured by Imagine K12, an incubator program devoted to supporting early stage ed-tech startups through a funding and mentorship program.

instaGrok is not a manually-created directory; it is not a filtered search. Instead, it uses sophisticated patent-pending semantic algorithms which analyze results in real time.

The site’s opening screen lists its features and purpose:

* Retrieve materials in multiple formats (pages, videos, forums, textbooks, users)
* Filter out non-educational content (e.g. news, shopping sites)
* Determine difficulty level of each material
* Rate the quality of each material
* Identify important concepts
* Visualize relationships between concepts
* Display definitions of terminology and examples of use in context
* Identify expert users on online forums
* Generate multiple-choice tests

Mark Williams, President and CEO of the company, approached me with this email:

I read your blog post regarding the death of Google Wonder Wheel.  We agree that young researchers need technology to visually and dynamically examine concepts (search terms) and their relationships with other concepts for discovery of new ideas.  That is why we created instaGrok.  We have also added features for curation of research (myGroks) and learning assessment (quizzes).

Mark and instaGrok co-founder Kirill Kireyev, Ph.D. (its Chief Technology Officer), shared their passions and their goals and toured the search with me, carefully listening to my feedback.  (They’ve already incorporated some of the improvements we discussed!)

While I am not a big fan of the auto-generated quizzes that appear with results–I am not sure they measure anything important–I am absolutely looking forward to introducing instaGrok with all my students.

Searchers can filter by difficulty level: school, high school, college, using the left navigation bar.  Users can further refine their searches by selecting from among a menu of themes and concepts. Clicking on a concept reveals a lengthy definition with examples of usage.  Clicking on the little Grok icon refocuses the search

In the overview tab:

The At a Glance feature presents interesting sentences and questions about your topic, with mouse-overs source notes and leads to explanatory articles.

Click on the mini version of the interactive concept map to open it and explore the relationships among concepts. Click on lines connecting concepts to understand their relationships.  Changing your filters changes the concept map.

The Websites, Video and Q & A tabs present a matrix with options for voting on the usefulness of a source, the link with annotations, previews or Q&A summaries, difficulty levels, and interactive concept clouds with definitions.

Registered users can track their search History or curate an online Journal of queries, visited sites, concepts, and quiz results, and add text notes, images (perhaps your concept maps), and links using the WYSIWYG editor.

Live chat is available.

instaGrok absolutely deserves a spot in the student search tool box.

It will not offer my high school students all the documents they need for major research projects, but that’s not the mission. instaGrok will get them started. It will help K12 learners discover vocabulary, context, and connections, and age-appropriate resources in multiple formats.  It will help them make sense of their discoveries.  It will allow them to engage in basic curation efforts.  And it gives us an opportunity to teach about using and responding to an interface to thoughtfully and powerfully refine  results.

And I have a hunch that instaGrok will get even better as it moves out of beta. You can help.

Mark and Kirill welcome  feedback from teachers, librarians, and students.  Let them know what you think as you do your own test-drives with your students.

His general questions for discussing the game are kind of timeless and his list of links are super helpful:

• Super Bowl Ads Home Page
• Media Literacy in Super Bowl Ad
• Media Literacy Home Page
• 40 years of Super Bowl Commercials
• Superbowl-ads.com Archive
• Superbowl Commercials
• Past Superbowl Commercials
• Super Bowl’s Greatest Commercials CBS
• Who’s Buying What In Super Bowl 2012? AdAge
• Adweek’s Complete Coverage Ads of Super Bowl XLVI

Frank also reminds us about Fair Use: Educators can legally record and use Super Bowl ads in instruction.

NBC offers a different kind of guide–a 77-page pdf Media Guide for Super Bowl XLVI which focuses on the details of broadcasting the game and includes such interesting features as game history on NBC, ratings history, statistics, camera placement maps, the history of Halftime, bios and photos of media figures.  This may be especially useful for both your hardcore fans and your production geeks.

Buzzfeed is another portal for the Super Bowl commercials.

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) recently released its own Code of Best Practice in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries.  Supported by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the code:

enhances the ability of librarians to rely on fair use by documenting the considered views of the library community about best practices in fair use, drawn from the actual practices and experience of the library community itself.

The Code was developed after a series of in-depth interviews with 65 librarians at academic and research institutions. It identifies the relevance of fair use in eight recurrent situations:

• Supporting teaching and learning with access to library materials via digital technologies
• Using selections from collection materials to publicize a library’s activities, or to create physical and virtual exhibitions
• Digitizing to preserve at-risk items
• Creating digital collections of archival and special collections materials
• Reproducing material for use by disabled students, faculty, staff, and other appropriate users
• Maintaining the integrity of works deposited in institutional repositories
• Creating databases to facilitate non-consumptive research uses (including search)
• Collecting material posted on the web and making it available

Most of these issues have relevance for the school library community as well.

This new code joins several others as part of a project of the School of Communication at American University Center for Social Media in Washington, DC, successfully serving to clarify how professionals might apply fair use to improve their practice using the tools of our time.

Existing codes include:

• Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education
• Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video
• Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for OpenCourseWare
• Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use
• Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Scholarly Research in Communication
• Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry
• Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Statement of Fair Use Best Practices for Media Studies Publishing
• Society for Cinema and Media Studies’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use in Teaching for Film and Media Educators
• Best Practices in Fair Use of Dance-related Materials

Patricia Aufderheide, University Professor in the School of Communication at American University and Director of the Center for Social Media notes

Librarians can now join other communities of practice that have designed such codes. They have been able to reduce market friction and meet mission with the confidence that they are acting within the best practices of their peers.

Download the code and follow #librarianscode on Twitter for further information.

And see my older posts relating to the release of the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education:

• Code of Best Practices in Fair Use: The Webinar
• Fair Use Code of Practice coming very soon!
• New Fair Use Code of Practice: A Call to Action

Quixey has been around since 2009, but it’s new to me.  The search was designed to

solve a problem – millions of apps were being created, but there was no simple way to find them. App discovery was limited to categories, top ten lists, directories and basic keyword search. Quixey was created to help people easily find apps simply by describing want they wanted to do.

.

But if you prefer the directory (or the blog review) approach, here are a few additional choices:

• APPitic, a collection of 1300+ apps for education
• Daryl Grabarek’s SLJ Touch and Go blog.
• Apps in Education apps listed by learning area
• I Education Apps Review (IEARN) a community effort to grade educational apps.
• iPads in Education (a Ning community)
• makeuseof Directory of Apps
• Appolicious a mobile app discovery service associated with Yahoo!

So, we used a trial version of LibGuides Mobile Site Builder as our platform.  (I also played around with WebMobi this weekend, and it looks promising and pretty, but because so much of our content already exists on LibGuides, and because it offered  familiar features, we stuck with what felt like home.)

We asked the kids about the essentials.  We also asked them for a little coding advice.

They were pretty excited about the prototype we demoed this afternoon.

My new practicum student, Kathie Jackson, describes the process:

At first, we created a list of links that exactly mirrored the library website. Then we realized the mobile site builder gave us the opportunity to streamline many of the features and ‘pop out’ the most frequently used and popular links, Guides, tools, and databases.

At various steps along the way, we walked a mobile phone around the library to get student input and tried to incorporate their wonderful ideas.

The great part is the mobile site builder is so easy to use we can continually change it on the fly. Okay, the really great part is it is very fun to use!

We’re still a little clunky, but we’re in beta and this is a process.

The University of Southern California Shoah Foundation recently launched the BETA version of a truly important gift–a searchable, interactive archive of more than 1000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses.

It is simply one of the most elegant and thoughtfully designed portals I have ever seen.  (And I haven’t seen it all yet.)

IWitness allows secondary teachers to host these moving, personal voices as guests in their classrooms, to assign them for study, to use them as creative inspiration. Visitors to the archive may simply click on thumbnails, search with suggested match support, or browse by 56 selected topics, which include: liberation, bystanders, ethics, faith, family, education, camps, ghetto life, resistance.  The site offers a downloadable thesaurus of keywords to promote effective searching.  Videos display in thumbnail with brief mouse-over descriptions and are accompanied with biographical information about the speakers and links to related articles from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia.  (Teachers and students may register to join the IWitness community to view the full-length video testimonies.) The site comes packed with images, glossaries, timelines, bibliographies, and other resources to support understanding of  the videos.

But IWitness is about far more than its powerful videos testimonies. It is a creatively designed, Common Core standards-aligned portal for instruction.  By accepting the Terms of Use, students and educators have permission to make derivative works using the editing tools provided on the site.

The About page explains the deeper value of the site to students:

You have access to an online tool that enables you to learn first hand from survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, giving you the opportunity to enrich your understanding of how this historical event had an impact on individual lives.

IWitness offers you the chance to take your education to the next level.

• You can watch testimony and learn about the full life stories of men and women who survived and witnessed the Holocaust.
• Build your own video projects using IWitness’s built-in online video editor.
• You can search for video testimony and photos that can add to your classroom projects and presentations in IWitness
• The built-in encyclopedia and glossary are great sources for better understanding the testimonies and the history reflected in IWitness
• Along the way, you will learn important digital media skills, including searching and ethical remixing, that will prepare you for becoming a digital citizen in the 21st century.

And for teachers:

IWitness enables educators and their students to watch, search, edit, and share video, images, and other content within a secure, password-protected space. IWitness is available over the Internet. No software to download and install.

Designed for Educators

IWitness is designed to be flexible and provide educators a variety of ways to integrate video testimony into their curriculum. Because it is available over the Internet, educators can use IWitness inside and outside of the classroom. Educators can have their students use IWitness for homework or they can choose to highlight short clips to use in their lessons. They can even incorporate IWitness as a semester-long experience, involving in-classroom activities and student-authored video projects. Educators can also develop their own activities specific to their own subject areas and interests using the IWitness Activity Builder.

• Teacher Support - IWitness includes features for teachers, including guidelines for using Holocaust survivor and witness testimony in education. The guidelines offer practical information and tips about how to integrate video testimony into classroom lessons and projects.
• Secure Student Moderation - Teachers who assign students an activity using IWitness will be able to view student projects in a secure and contained “classroom” within the IWitness site that is personal to the student and can only be viewed and assessed by the teacher.
• Student-Centered Learning - Students have the opportunity to use technology to become more active learners while encountering survivors and other eyewitnesses talking about their experiences before, during and after the Holocaust. This application empowers them to participate in their own learning by providing them with the tools to think critically, investigate, develop projects, analyze, and collaborate with others.
• Educational Standards

- This application responds to the demand to build multi-literacies skills and responsible digital citizenship among educators and students. To this end, among the many curricular standards it will incorporate, this resource aligns with standards offered by the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) (www.iste.org).

Note: I couldn’t wait for the two-day registration IWitness community lag time to share this news.   The six-minute video introduction is promise enough for me.

The portal debuts at the UN on Monday showcasing the work of 350 New York City students.

Promise me you will share it with your teachers on Monday.

(Read Digital Shift, ALA’s PIPA, SOPA and the OPEN Act Quick Reference Guide, and my previous post for background.)

The official release from the Wikimedia Foundation:

English Wikipedia to go dark January 18 in opposition to SOPA/PIPA

San Francisco — January 16, 2012 — On January 18, 2012, in an unprecedented decision, the Wikipedia community has chosen to blackout the English version of Wikipedia for 24 hours, in protest against proposed legislation in the United States — the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the U.S. House of Representatives, and PROTECTIP (PIPA) in the U.S. Senate. If passed, this legislation will harm the free and open Internet and bring about new tools for censorship of international websites inside the United States.

Wikipedia administrators confirmed this decision Monday afternoon (PST) in a public statement

Over the course of the past 72 hours, over 1800 Wikipedians have joined together to discuss proposed actions that the community might wish to take against SOPA and PIPA. This is by far the largest level of participation in a community discussion ever seen on Wikipedia, which illustrates the level of concern that Wikipedians feel about this proposed legislation. The overwhelming majority of participants support community action to encourage greater public action in response to these two bills. Of the proposals considered by Wikipedians, those that would result in a “blackout” of the English Wikipedia, in concert with similar blackouts on other websites opposed to SOPA and PIPA, received the strongest support.

“Today Wikipedians from around the world have spoken about their opposition to this destructive legislation,” said Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. “This is an extraordinary action for our community to take – and while we regret having to prevent the world from having access to Wikipedia for even a second, we simply cannot ignore the fact that SOPA and PIPA endanger free speech both in the United States and abroad, and set a frightening precedent of Internet censorship for the world.”

We urge Wikipedia readers to make your voices heard. If you live in the United States, find your elected representative in Washington (https://www.eff.org/sopacall). If you live outside the United States, contact your State Department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs or similar branch of government. Tell them you oppose SOPA and PIPA, and want the internet to remain open and free.

About the Wikimedia Foundation

http://wikimediafoundation.org

http://blog.wikimedia.org

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore Media Metrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the Wikimedia Foundation receive more than 474 million unique visitors per month, making them the fifth-most popular web property world-wide (comScore, November 2011). Available in 282 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 20 million articles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than 100,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the Wikimedia Foundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarily through donations and grants.

Media Contact:
For the Wikimedia Foundation

Jay Walsh
Head of Communications
Wikimedia Foundation
Tel. +1 415 839 6885 x 6609
jwalsh@wikimedia.org

Last June, I was thinking:

that we could/should begin to ask learners to interact with and make sense of data, not merely by studying and consuming it, but by creating and designing with it.  That designing infographics might be a worthy new strategy for creatively, and perhaps beautifully, communicating the result of student research–for developing and inspiring new levels of information and media fluency.

Using the following presentations as a launching points, I created a LibGuide/lesson for our own students.

• Infographics as a Creative Assessment session by Kathy Schrock (video of Kathy’s session)
• ISTE 11 Infographics session by Jane Krauss and Diana Laufenberg
• ISTE11 Infographics Links, session by Laurie Fowler and Katie Kinney

The Guide allowed me to explore the growing number of portals providing data sets, to gather a variety of graphing, mapping, timelining and brainstorming tools, icon and graphic libraries, and so much more.

While I’ve yet to present a formal lesson in infographic production, students in our Global Studies classes were introduced to the idea as an option for communicating their final research project on a global crisis.  We have a few promising products in the works which I will try to share in a future post.