Multimedia Literature

By Jennifer Maciejewski

June 2007

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Getting Started

Before teachers can integrate the multimedia resources available online into their instruction, they must have several pieces of technology available for classroom use on a daily basis: a laptop or a desktop computer equipped with speakers and Internet access, and a projector. Not only will this enable them to be more effective in the administrative aspects of their job, from communicating with parents via e-mail to using an electronic grade book, but also it will allow them to create and deliver multimedia-infused lessons with ease. For instance, during a poetry unit, the educator can use the computer to access Poets.org to play an audio clip of Langston Hughes reading his poem "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," while the students follow along with the projected text, listening for inflection and pacing, says Nancy Pelser- Borowicz, district media specialist for Orange County Public Schools in Orlando, Fla. Not only will they gain a deeper understanding of the roles that inflection and pacing play in poetry as they listen to him read his work, but the clip includes Hughes explaining the inspiration for the poem, providing insights that would be likely not included in a standard textbook.

Even without a digital whiteboard, teachers can download free Smartboard software, which allows them to have a digital whiteboard on their screen they can use when they present the material. After the lesson, educators can e-mail the file or post it to the school's Web site so students can access the material on later occasions. If they add a Web camera to the mix, teachers can use the equipment for videoconferences, which allows authors to make virtual visits to the class. Other useful digital equipment includes digital video and still cameras, podcasting kits to help users create, produce and promote podcasts, personal digital assistants, document projectors and scanners.

"Those are the kinds of tools that every teacher needs to have in today's media-saturated world," says Gregg Festa, director of the ADP Center for Teacher Preparation and Learning Technologies in Montclair, N.J. "We have this pressure to use technology for teaching and learning. For the last 20 or so years, it was a top-down pressure from the administrators, the boards of education and the taxpayers who funded the programs. But now the pressure has shifted. It's more of a bottom-up pressure; the students want to know why the teachers aren't using this stuff and why they don't have access to it."

Integrating Multimedia: A Cross-Curricular Concept Although there are countless possibilities for English and language arts instruction, any discipline can benefit from the thoughtful integration of multimedia tools and technology in its curriculum. Students taking a Spanish class can practice the language while chatting live with a native speaker in another country during a videoconference. Art students can gain insight into an illustrator's process by watching an interview available on TeachingBooks.net. Math students can use virtual manipulatives to get a mental image of the equation. To get started, here are a few fee-based and free online resources that you can share with the educators and media specialists in your district. FEE BASEDFEE-BASED Discovery Education's unitedstreaming www.unitedstreaming.com This resource provides access to more than 5,000 full-length educational videos, which have been segmented into more than 50,000 content-specific video clips. The site also includes an online professional development area; a library of lesson plans that integrate unitedstreaming videos; and the Discovery Educator Network, where teachers share their unitedstreaming lesson ideas. Fee: K8, $1,495; 9-12, $1,995 NetTrekker d.i. www.nettrekker.com This database has over 180,000 standards based, educator-selected online resources, which teachers can search to integrate into direct instruction or students and parents can access from home to research a topic. Fee: $1,665 per school per year; discounts available for large districts. ProQuest CultureGrams online.culturegrams.com This standards-based resource, which includes a World Edition, Kids Edition, Provinces Edition and States Edition, gives students an interactive look at another culture, from listening to audio files of national anthems and country name pronunciations to tracking down the state flag, bird, tree and flower. Fee: varies. ProQuest Digital Teaching and Learning www.proquestk12.com This database contains more than 2,000 fulltext magazines, newspapers, reference books and transcripts, as well as thousands of pictures, maps, educator-approved Web sites from Homework Central, and audio/video content. The curriculum edition, which educators can also search by standards, includes access to ProQuest Learning: Literature, which features more than 180,000 searchable works of literature from medieval times to the present as well as author biographies, contemporary criticism, reviews and multimedia resources organized into more than 3,000 author pages. Fee: Costs vary. TeachingBooks www.teachingbooks.net An online collection of multimedia resources about K12 authors and illustrators, the site features video clips of author interviews, audio clips of authors pronouncing their names and , reading their books , links to the authors' and illustrators' official Web sites, and an educator area that provides access to numerous other resources. Fee: Ranges from $315 for a single school where more than 50 percent of students receive free lunch, to $4,400 for a large school district. FREE American Memory Project memory.loc.gov/ammem With its sound recordings, still and moving images, manuscripts, maps and sheet music, the project contains a digital record of American history and creativity culled from the collections of the Library of Congress and other institutions. AT&T Knowledge Network Explorer www.kn.pacbell.com This site provides multidisciplinary technology- based lessons and WebQuests, as well as information about videoconferencing. BBC Interviews www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/professions This includes links to audio clips of interviews with prominent people in a variety of professions, from writers and cartoonists to scientists and architects. Edutopia www.edutopia.org This has an extensive professional development section that focuses on strategies for integrating technology into classroom instruction. Google Earth earth.google.com View satellite images, maps, terrain and 3D buildings of virtually any location around the world on this site. Library of Congress's National Book Festival www.loc.gov/bookfest View Webcasts of authors speaking at the annual event at this site National Public Radio (NPR) www.npr.org This site offers links to audio clips and podcasts of author interviews and other segments of NPR's programming. PBS Teachers www.pbs.org/teachers This has thousands of standards-based resources for multiple disciplines, such as lesson plans and on-demand video, as well as professional development for educators. Poets www.poets.org This site includes biographical information about poets as well as audio clips of poets reading their work, complete with the full text. Promethean Planet www.prometheanplanet.com The Curriculum Corner includes more than 1,500 educator-created Activstudio and Activprimary lessons, and the flipcharts can be searched by state standards. San Francisco Symphony Kids www.sfskids.org This site allows kids to check out musical instruments online, listen to classical music or explore musical concepts such as tempo and pitch in the music lab. Scholastic's Authors & Books www.teacher.scholastic.com/authors andbooks/authorstudies This publishing company hosts free moderated online chats with authors throughout the year on its site and provides links to transcripts of previous virtual visits. Scribbling Women www.scribblingwomen.org A project of the Public Media Foundation, this site provides links to the radio plays of American women writers as well as lesson plans. Sounds of the World's Animals www.georgetown.edu/faculty/ballc/animals Though animals sound the same around the world, the sounds they make are written differently in other languages. This site offers audio clips of nearly 40 animals and includes the spellings of their noises in more than 20 languages. Thinkfinity www.marcopolo-education.org/home.aspx This resource is home to seven discipline specific, standards-based resources that help educators integrate technology into K12 instruction: - ArtsEdge (John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts): artsedge.kennedy-center.org - EconEdLink (National Council on Economic Education): www.econedlink.org - EDSITEment: edsitement.neh.gov - Illuminations (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics): illuminations.nctm.org - ReadWriteThink (International Reading Association and National Council of Teachers of English): www.readwritethink.org - Science NetLinks (American Association for the Advancement of Science): www.sciencenetlinks.com - Xpeditions (National Geographic Society): www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions This I Believe www.thisibelieve.org Read and listen to essays aired on National Public Radio. Toni Buzzeo www.tonibuzzeo.com This author and media specialist offers resources for learning more about arranging and hosting virtual author visits on her own Web page. TrackStar trackstar.4teachers.org Here educators can view "Tracks"-virtual lesson plans that link to audio or video clips and other Web sites and include annotations created by other teachers or use the software to build their own. Wired for Books www.wiredforbooks.com/swaim This site includes the uncut, behind-the scenes author interviews that were the foundation of Don Swaim's long-running CBS Radio show Book Beat, and links to the two minute clips that ran during the program.

Multimedia Integration in Action

Current technology tools have countless applications in English and language arts classrooms, such as the broad array of free and fee-based online curriculum resources in the "Integrating Multimedia: A Cross-Curricular Concept" sidebar. For example, students can try their hand at writing their own poetry, posting drafts on a blog so that their classmates can offer constructive criticism online. After they have a final draft, students can use podcasts to record themselves reading their original work of poetry while focusing on emphasizing their own key words and then create a PowerPoint slide presentation with embedded multimedia and their poem's text to present results. Carrie Deahl, who teaches freshman and honors junior English at Alhambra High School in the Phoenix Union High School District in Arizona, has her students submit their poems for publication online at sites such as TeenInk.org.

"It's not enough anymore just to watch media," says Scott C. Kinney, director of the Discovery Educator Network. "Kids want to interact with it; they want to produce their own media. The skeptics say, 'They learned how to use iMovie and made a digital story. So what?' But what people are missing is if you look at that process, it's the same demonstration of knowledge as it is in any other form. To get to that point, they had to go out and research topics, synthesize information, put it into a sequence that made sense, write and review a script and then communicate that script. It's not absent of all those wonderful things that we've always done; it just gives them ownership."

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