TED launches new educationation channel

This report from the Chronicle today (March 12, 2012)
"The nonprofit group called TED, known for streaming 18-minute video lectures about big ideas, today opened a new YouTube channel designed for teachers and professors, with videos that are even shorter.
The new channel, called TED-Ed, was announced a year ago, but its leaders are only now unveiling the project’s first videos. There are only 11 as of today, but the goal is to add new ones regularly. Within three months from now, a new video could appear each day...
To produce the new videos, the group is connecting content experts with professional animators to create highly illustrated productions. The average length of these videos is about five minutes..
Among the first video topics are “How many universes are there?,” “Why don’t we see evidence of alien life?,” and “How pandemics spread (through history and across the world).”

New copyright exemption may help your teaching

A recent article from Inside Higher Ed highlights increased ability to use excerpts from DVD's for educational purposes...
"The U.S. Copyright Office on Monday promulgated a number of new exemptions* to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, including one allowing university staffers and students to hack DVD content and display it for educational purposes. If a university or student lawfully obtains copy of a DVD, the agency says, they can bypass the encryption so long as "circumvention is accomplished solely in order to accomplish the incorporation of short portions of motion pictures into new works for... Educational uses by college and university professors and by college and university film and media studies students." The exemption applies when professors or students want to use excerpts of the hacked DVD in documentary films or "non-commercial videos." Tracy Mitrano, director of I.T. policy at Cornell University and a technology law blogger for Inside Higher Ed, called the decision "very big news," and "good news," for higher education, noting that advocates in academe have been lobbying for an expansion of fair use exemptions for some time. One campus that might take heart is the University of California at Los Angeles, which an educational media group threatened to sue last spring for copying and streaming DVD content on course websites. The university had refused to stop the practice, and a UCLA spokesman said the group, the Association for Information and Media Equipment, has not followed through. He said UCLA is reviewing the new rules."

*See item #1 midway down the page here.

Awesome Stories: Media resources for educators

We are said to learn best from stories and the Awesome Stories web site puts that strategy to good use by offering narratives about people, events, history and more. Each narrative is enriched with audio and video clips, images, and primary documents. There are databases for all the media that are freely available to teachers once you sign up . Lesson plans are offered as is a monthly newsletter that highlights current events. This month there's the story behind the story of the movie "The Soloist" which talks about music and about schizophrenia. Great resource.