Everyone who’s had to make a poster for a class project at one time or another, raise your hand. I’m going to guess that pretty much all of you reading this raised your hands and at some point in your schooling had to wrestle poster boards on the bus or walking down the street, worrying that the glue wouldn’t hold and various attachments would fall off and fly away on the wind. (Okay, maybe that was just me?)
Posters are time-honored methods of sharing information: not only are they still used to communicate important ideas to people all over the world, but of course educators have been using them as assessment products for years. Creating a poster forces students to consider what information to include and how to organize, arrange, and illustrate it. These are still valuable experiences for youth—skills that are no less important today than they were twenty years ago when you could write a computer program with a hole punch. Glogster seeks to bring the poster into the 21st century by allowing users to create a digital poster, or glog, with multimedia and hyperlinked elements to extend and supplement the information it contains. (The initial “g” in “glog” is meant to evoke “graphics.”)
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One of the most common concerns I hear from educators when we’re discussing using social media tools with youth is the sheer number of sites out there. Using new media for information gathering requires patience. It can be really hard to make sense of how an event or topic is being played out across the major platforms: tracking topics across Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, YouTube, and blogs requires a real desire to see what’s happening in real time. Even if you’re a seasoned web browser tab jockey or use a social media aggregator like FriendFeed, events in a timeline without context or analysis aren’t being displayed to their best advantage.
Storify is an online platform that allows users to bring together disparate entries from various new media platforms and curate a story.
This post is part of a series of interviews highlighting leaders in the field of New Learning (what we call “NLI at Inquiry”). Recently, we interviewed Chicago Public Library Commissioner Mary Dempsey on subjects including how the library has reshaped the city, new media’s role in the library, and her thoughts on the future of urban libraries. Here, in Part II of the interview, she discusses the ways that CPL’s new media learning center, YOUmedia, meets the needs of youth in Chicago and her thoughts on how urban libraries will evolve to meet students’ needs in the future.
Listen to the full interview here:
Music loops have long been a staple of electronic and experimental music and have since worked their way into rock and roll, hip-hop, techno, and other musical genres. As with so many of the tools we’ve looked at, creating loops from a series of samples – once a painstaking process for all but professional music producers with special equipment – is now easy thanks to applications like Audacity and GarageBand, which make home recording and mixing fairly simple if you want to create your own audio. What if you just want to play in someone else’s musical sandbox? Then Looplabs is for you. In-browser editor? Check. Pre-loaded samples? Check. Easy publishing? Check.
Loop creation just got as easy as drag-and-drop.
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