Animoto–a tool for creating short videos that integrate photos, music, narration, text, and video–bills itself as “the end of slideshows.”

The free version offers limited features and caps video length at 30 seconds.  Otherwise, this online application is an easy way to circumvent many of the technical aspects of video editing; as they say, it’s “fast, [mostly] free and shockingly easy.”

Check out Edutopia’s Ten Top Tips for Teaching with New Media, for some cool tools and creative strategies for using digital media in education.

A handy resource: Edutopia's Ten Top Tips for Teaching with New Media

Edutopia disects the “media-rich, networked world of infinite possibilities” of the Digital Generation.

The multimedia resources in this special project are tremendous.  A few highlights include educator Vicki Davis, a technology superuser on how she engages her students through technology; guru Howard Gardner on Digital Youth; and profiles of some pretty amazing kids.

In a related feature article, Chicago’s Digital Youth Network is a great example of how social networking and learning communities are converging to engage students around creative media projects.

The history of Kids with Cameras is a compelling story of education, technology, and the arts coming together to transform children’s lives.

Kids with Cameras transforms the lives of children growing up in Calcutta's red light district.

Edutopia's special issue on the Arts in Public Education

For anyone who may have missed it this spring (myself included), Edutopia’s special issue on the arts in education is worth a look: Special Report: Why Arts Education Must Be Saved. According to Edutopia insiders, it is one of their most requested back issues.

A few weeks ago I was happy to catch the first PBS broadcast of Thirteen / WNET.org’s The Music Instinct: Science & Song, which offers much interesting and thought provoking material on music, learning, and human development.

Today I had a chance to check out the website for The Music Instinct. The site is a nice example of a multi-platform programming approach, pairing the two-hour documentary with an online presence that offers a substantive collection of video clips from the production, interactive components, social media tools, and integration with other websites. The site also includes a section for educators, where you’ll find three lesson plans that provide a framework for using video from the documentary in the classroom.

The most meaningful and creative use of social media in this project has to be Thirteen / WNET.org’s partnership with Indaba Music, an online community designed for musicians to create, remix, collaborate, and share. Indaba hosted a competition to create the theme music for The Music Instinct, and collaborated with Thirteen on the creation of several simple interactive modules featured in the Educators section of the site.

The inclusion of interactive components, while a gesture in the right direction, also highlights the persistent broad based need in the field of music education for high quality interactive tools that support music learning. A scan of the tools available through The Music Instinct site–including several interactive sites found in the web resource lists associated with each of the lesson plans–reveals how limited the current offerings are.

ISMIR, The International Society for Music Information Retrieval, hosts a fantastic collection of of serious research papers on music and information science in the online proceedings of ISMIR’s annual conferences. I recently came across a keynote address by Nicholas Cook, given at the 2005 ISMIR conference, on the relationship between the fields of musicology and information science. Cook’s observations point toward the potential impact of information science on a wide range of research in the arts–not just music. The paper also suggests some tantalizing implications for how the arts might be taught, studied, and practiced by future generations.

The following observation is telling–although it is far from suggesting a true intersection of these two fields, or the “computational musicology” that Cook goes on to describe in his talk (which I think is exactly his point in including it):

“It simply doesn’t make sense to teach music without technology nowadays, so that virtually everyone who teaches music either has mastered the technology or feels guilty that they haven’t.”

During NECC 2009, Dalia Khalil, director of E.era, the Egyptian Association for Educational Resources, shared with me the recent success of The Big Read Egypt-U.S., a Global Cultural Initiative of the Cultural Programs Division of the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs.  A partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Arts Midwest, the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the initiative is designed to deepen cultural understanding and dialogue between Egyptians and Americans through the shared reading of each nation’s great literary treasures, and forms an international component to the NEA’s The Big Read.

The selected book from Egypt is The Thief and the Dogs by Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz. People in Egypt have their choice of three books from the U.S.: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck.

You can find more about The Big Read Egypt-U.S. on the U.S. Department of State website in their coverage of the announcement event and on the initiative’s page, which includes a slide show of the opening event produced by E.era.

As part of this exchange, there has also been an effort to align musical performances by exchange artists with the time period and cultural themes of the selected books.

In addition to The Thief and the Dogs by Naguib Mahfouz, the other international selections in The Big Read 2009-10 were The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Russian author Leo Tolstoy and Sun, Stone, and Shadows: 20 Great Mexican Short Stories edited by Jorge H. Hernández.

This morning’s session showcased the project-based learning and student creative media projects from the year-long partnership between Adobe and iEARN (International Education and Resource Network). Participants in the project represent 12 countries: Argentina, Belarus, Botswana, Brazil, Canada, Egypt, India Pakistan, Russia, Turkey, Uganda, and the USA. The program focuses on teacher professional development, bringing teachers together in collaborative online professional development experience that resulted in student-produced digital media projects.

Media from many of the student projects can be found in the gallery of the Adobe Youth Voices website.

Dalia Khalil presented on E.era, the Egyptian Association for Educational Resources, a NGO that grew out of participation in iEARN’s programs. The organization’s work seems to echo (or inspire) President Obama’s recent remarks in Cairo that articulated a vision for collaborative learning between our two countries, and a commitment to “invest in on-line learning for teachers and children around the world; and create a new online network, so a teenager in Kansas can communicate instantly with a teenager in Cairo.”

Standout projects from this morning’s session included Street Food: A Wake Up Call, a heartbreaking and stomach wrenching video on street food in Pakistan, and Hidden a video deconstructing graffiti art with original hip-hop music composed by Robin Boston of the Toronto YMCA Academy.

The session included presentations from visiting educators from Belarus, Egypt, Pakistan, and Uganda.

Adobe and iEARN have also made available a photo essay from students in India (as a glossy print publication) and a collection of student media projects on DVD.

Here is Robin Boston’s video, Hidden:

P1010920, originally uploaded by christopher-amos.

A small part of the massive exhibition space at NECC 2009