From DSC:
I put together a short listing of some solid tools for working with multimedia on the Mac. There are many more out there, but these should do the job(s) for you…especially Telestream’s ScreenFlow.
What is Book Creator and How Can Educators Use It? — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang
Excerpt:
Book Creator is a free tool that allows educators and their students to create multimedia ebooks based off of class assignments and topics.
Available on Apple and Android tablets and phones, and on Google Chrome for desktop use, Book Creator is a digital resource that helps students explore their creative sides while learning.
The tool lends itself well to active learning and collaborative projects of all kinds, and is appropriate for various subjects and age groups.
Book Creator gives students the ability to upload images, vidoes, audio, and more within the ebooks they create. It also empowers them to draw, take notes, and collaborate in real-time with their classmates and instructor.
Read on to find out everything you need to know about Book Creator.
Also see the Book Creator’s website:
Addendum on 5/21/21:
Addendums on 5/24/21:
As with all of Book Creator we have made the image search fully accessible to screen readers and keyboard navigation. But we thought we could go a bit further with the image search and make it accessible to younger kids or ELL students who aren’t super confident with their spelling by introducing a voice search.
Addendum on 6/7/21:
Global Accessibility Awareness Day is this Thursday, May 20, 2021
Help us celebrate the tenth Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)! The purpose of GAAD is to get everyone talking, thinking and learning about digital access and inclusion, and the more than One Billion people with disabilities/impairments.
Also see:
What if we could create these kinds of calendars and/or apps for faculty and staff as well as for students? — idea from Daniel Christian. The vehicles could be developed as analog/physical formats or in digital formats and apps. In the digital realm, one could receive a daily notification.
For faculty/staff:
[The Corporate Training / L&D world could do this as well.]
For students
Digital upskilling in legal: More than just new technology — from legalexecutiveinstitute.com by Bob Dolinsky; with thanks to Gabe Teninbaum for this resource
Excerpt:
How many law firms have digital upskilling programs for their lawyers and staff members? Based on what I hear and read, very few, if any.
Amazon, for example, recently announced a commitment of more than $700 million to its “Upskilling 2025” program, an internal training initiative designed to promote customer satisfaction and worker advancement. Another example is PwC, which has a digital upskilling program to develop its in-house talent pool called “New world. New skills.” In 2019, PwC announced that it would invest $3 billion into job training for its 275,000 employees around the world, enhancing its workforce and client service delivery to better address emerging digital needs.
The goals of these and similar initiatives is to help ensure that employees have the skills in the digital arena to be successful, to position these organizations as preferred employers, and to provide customer and client service excellence.
Also from Gabe:
“Virtual justice” (the preferred, if unsettling, term) is an emergency response to a dire situation. But it is also a vision some judicial innovators had long tried to realize. One leading booster, Michigan Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack, told me that going online can make courts not only safer but “more transparent, more accessible, and more convenient.” Witnesses, jurors, and litigants no longer need to miss hours of work and fight traffic. Attorneys with cases in multiple courts can jump from one to another by swiping on their phones.
NJ High School Adds New Recording Studio to Learning Spaces — from spaces4learning.com by Matt Jones
Excerpt:
A career and technical high school in New Jersey has added new professional recording gear to one of its teaching spaces. County Prep High School, part of Hudson County Schools of Technology, added hardware from Solid State Logic (SSL), a UK-based company that manufactures analog and digital audio consoles for music and audio production. Students in the music and audio technology program learn how to write their own songs and produce their own music. The senior project involves putting a label together and releasing songs.
The new studio at County Prep High School features professional equipment from Solid State Logic.
Source: Solid State Logic
Also see:
Addendum on 4/1/21:
If equity is a priority, UDL is a must — from cultofpedagogy.com by Katie Novak
Once you identify the firm goal, ask yourself, “Based on the variability in my class, what barriers may prevent learners from working toward that goal and how can I eliminate those barriers through design?”
Excerpt:
When we design the same learning pathways for all learners, we might tell ourselves we are being fair, but in fact, single pathways are exclusionary. Beverly Daniel Tatum, author of the critically acclaimed book, Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race, challenges us to focus on impact over intentions. It may not be our intent to exclude our learners, but the reality is that many students do not have opportunities to learn at high levels or to access curriculum and instruction that is accessible, engaging, culturally sustaining, and linguistically appropriate.
Luckily, there is a framework that rejects these one-size-fits-all solutions and empowers educators to proactively design learning experiences so all students can increase their brainpower and accelerate and own their learning. The framework is Universal Design for Learning (UDL).
UDL is a framework for designing learning experiences so students have options for how they learn, what materials they use, and how they demonstrate their learning.
From DSC:
I put together this graphic as I’m working on a Module (for Canvas) to address the topic of accessibility:
Chrome now instantly captions audio and video on the web — from theverge.com by Ian Carlos Campbell
The accessibility feature was previously exclusive to some Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones
Excerpt:
Google is expanding its real-time caption feature, Live Captions, from Pixel phones to anyone using a Chrome browser, as first spotted by XDA Developers. Live Captions uses machine learning to spontaneously create captions for videos or audio where none existed before, and making the web that much more accessible for anyone who’s deaf or hard of hearing.
…
Chrome’s Live Captions worked on YouTube videos, Twitch streams, podcast players, and even music streaming services like SoundCloud in early tests run by a few of us here at The Verge. Google also says Live Captions will work with audio and video files stored on your hard drive if they’re opened in Chrome. However, Live Captions in Chrome only work in English, which is also the case on mobile.
The excerpt below is from The 7 best online whiteboards in 2021 — from zapier.com by Maria Myre
From DSC:
Other potentially-relevant tools/vendors here include:
