Everything Tech

If you don’t know the difference between a forced flash and an automatic flash, then Bob Hoffman’s Encyclopedia of Educational Technology is right up your alley. With everything from eLearning to Video learning, it’s organized into large categories that each have dozens of individual topics. A must read on the Web for any techno-saavy teacher, there are thousands of definitions, easy explanations and tons of tips and tricks.
Bottom line: With entries on everything from digital cameras to Web-based training, the dictionary is a great resource for teachers and administrators.

Elementary Science Lessons

Finding appropriate resources to engage elementary school children in scientific inquiry can be a challenge. Enter Discovery Education Science for Elementary, the new digital service from the creators of Discovery Education streaming that is basically an extension of Discovery Education Science for Middle School, launched in 2007. The service is organized into four areas: Learn, Explore, Demonstrate, and Extend. This provides a well-rounded approach to elementary science, giving students and teachers plenty of opportunities to understand tricky concepts using a variety of tools.

SAFARI Montage Integrated with Promethean Activboard

Educators can now present content from SAFARI Montage’s video-on-demand digital media management system on the Promethean Activboard. Users can freeze frame video and annotate over it by using the pen to write notes and hightlight information. SAFARI Montage lets users save, meta tags and share Promethean lessons, saved on flipcharts, on their district’s central server.

Discovery Education Introduces Media Management and Content Collaboration Service

Teachers love to integrate video clips into lessons, but managing all that media can get unwieldy. Discovery Education’s new MediaShare web-based media management service allows administrators, media specialists and teachers to upload, correlate, manage, and distribute user-created or licensed digital content. Using MediaShare, educators can upload content to either locally hosted servers or to Discovery Education servers, allowing teachers, parents and students to access digital content from anywhere.  Once content is uploaded, administrators have the flexibility to set sharing permissions to ensure users have the correct level of access to digital assets.

New Player in the Video Streaming Market

Move over Discovery, there’s a new streaming kid in town. School Specialty Media will announce its new online Learn360 video streaming service for K-12 schools at FETC. Learn360 boasts a library of 1,400+ on-demand, full-length educational videos, thousands of video clips, audio files, and still images (the content comes from School Specialty Media’s Sunburst Visual Media brand and other content partners like National Geographic and PBS). Administrators can add their own content and, of course, all videos are aligned to state standards. We’ll check it out at the conference and post our feedback live from Orlando. In the meantime, read more on the website.