Multimedia

A combination of text, graphics, videos, photographs, music, colourful backgrounds etc creates an attractive and powerful medium for conveying a message. There are a number of Multimedia tools available but few are collaborative by nature. It is important to consider the end user as combining these elements (particularly video and music) can create a very large file that will download slowly.

A good instructional video on the various features of Nota media type="youtube" key="iLtt29iQlQ8" height="349" width="425" align="center"
 * Nota** gets the top spot here because of its intuitive simplicity and its support of real time collaboration for multiple users. The creation space isn't as large as others but it does all fit on the screen without the need to scroll. For a quick mashup of text, graphics, videos, photos and more this is a very useful classroom tool.

"A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate slides and leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam)." Whist this is the case and ** Voicethread ** is well used in education by many teachers it is not real time collaborative. As such, it doesn't fit the criteria for this workshop but it is a powerful web 2 tool that is worthy of mention.

Glogster isn't an online collaborative tool in the sense we are examining in this workshop. However, Glogs are very impressive online multimedia posters that can be created through a collaborative process in class. **Glogster Edu** adds an extra layer of classroom management tools - $99 per year for 200 students is pretty cheap. Educators can have a very basic account for 50 students with no administration features for free.