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Teaching with images, sounds and video

  • Stimulus: Multimedia are wonderful stimuli and should be used as much as possible for starting tasks, encouraging discussion, raising questions, developing enquiry, making connections.

  • Mood setting: Multimedia can be used to set a mood in a classroom for drama, literacy, discussion etc

  • Capturing Achievement : Using photos, audio and video to capture achievement when note-taking or looking at written work is just not enough; in discursive work, circle time, show and tell, drama, narrative speaking, mind-mapping, PE, art work, technology etc...

  • Reinforcement and retentions: Creating podcasts or audiocasts of difficult and/or important materials which could be downloaded from the school VLE / website or given to the students on a memory stick.

Student use of images, sounds and video

If a picture paints a thousand words then how many does a video clip! Many students will have access to both a digital stills and a digital video camera via their mobile devices (see the paper on section 1 of this site). Thus they will be able to capture visual data which can be used in all sorts of ways. For some ideas see some of the case studies.

  • Field Trips: students can capture information in all formats on any trip. These give a more accurate and much better record of the trip than a clip board and mean that instruction sheets can be laminated with the answers recorded rather than scribbled.

  • Audio-diaries: Children using sound / video recording to make notes, record thoughts, reflect

  • Presentations: Children can make presentations and add sound using Voice Narration (Powerpoint) an effective way of providing assessment materials for those who are more orate than literate. Pictures also add to almost any piece of narrative or factual writing both images from a store and images that the pupils have taken themselves using any digital device. Get them to port them to school on their mobile device or using a key drive.

  • Story Boarding: Making story board using images and speech bubbles or voice recording - can be used across the curriculum. Both Photostory3 and Powerpoint/Keynote are good vehicles for this

  • Infomercials: Make a 3' video as a short news item on a subject that you are studying

  • Interview: Interview a person or persons about a topic you are studying - edit this as appropriate

Support Materials

Here are some useful websites/resource for finding images on-line.

  • Botanical Society of America: A great collection of biological images - link
  • British Library : From the beautiful to the bizarre, collections from the BL - link
  • Cepolina: A collection of photos organised by key word - link
  • Flickr: a photo-sharing website which has a huge range of images of varying quality - link
  • Google Earth : A software application that allows you to 'see' anywhere - link
  • Google Images: A great bank of images but be aware of copyright limitations - link
  • LTS Scotland : Collections from Learning and Teaching Scotland - link
  • Multimap: Maps from all over the world - link
  • NASA image gallery: Images of the very big - link
  • The NASA earth observatory: Images of the earth from space - link
  • National Geographic PhotoGallery: Great images of the natural world - link
  • National Portrait Gallery: Collections of the most famous Britains - link
  • The New York Public Library: Image collection from the NYPL - link
  • Scanning Electron Microscope: Images of the very small - link
  • Strathclyde University's RS department: images for RE - link
  • Wikipedia Commons [Images]: Part of the GNU project for sharing resource - link

Here are some useful websites/resource for finding sounds on-line.

  • British Library Sound collections: A huge archive of sounds from the British Library - link
  • BBC Radio stimulus sounds: Part of the school's radio archive - link
  • The Children's Poetry Archive: A wonderful collection of poets reading poems - link
  • Freeplay music: A wide collection of mood music - link
  • The History Channel: A huge collection of clips - link
  • iTunes: A great collection of all sorts of sounds - link
  • Pac DV: A range of free sound effects - link
  • Partners in Rhyme: A commercial sounds site with selection of copyright free samples - link
  • Wikipedia Commons [Sounds]: Part of the GNU project for sharing resource - link

Here are some useful websites/resource for finding video on-line.

  • AOL video : A good collection of video for teachers to search - link
  • BBC Learning Zone clips: A collection of video from the BBC - link
  • British Pathe : A wonderful collection of video - link
  • Free stock footage: A good collection of low resolution video - link
  • The History Channel: A huge collection of clips - link
  • Learning one broadband: A collection of resource from the BBC - link
  • NASA multimedia gallery: Images of the very big - link
  • Teacher Tube : A growing set of video resources for teaching - link
  • Video Google: A collection of video clips from commercial sources - link
  • Wikipedia Commons [Video]: Part of the GNU project for sharing resource - link
  • YouTube: A fantastic source of video, it is sometimes hard to find the needle in the haystack - link

There are some useful software packages for using sounds and images. See the open-source site for more details of these:

  • Audacity: A sound editing package
  • Gimp: A photo editing programme akin to Photoshop
  • Photostory: A piece of software for creating presentations