Build a Media Gallery With Your Students in 2013

One of the challenges of having students create videos, slideshows, podcasts, and other multimedia productions in your classroom is making sure that they are respectful of copyright. One way to avoid any worry about copyright is by having students use media that they have created from scratch. Of course, building up a gallery of media that is large enough for all of your students to use takes time. To start building up a gallery of images, sounds, and video clips that your students can use in their projects commit to a 365 project for 2013. This year have your students make daily contributions to a group media gallery. If a daily schedule is too frequent for you try a weekly schedule with your students. Here are some tools that you can use to collect and create your classroom media gallery.

Tools for creating a classroom media gallery.
Aviary's Mobile image editor is a free app for iOS and Android devices. The Aviary mobile app allows you to quickly crop images and add effects to your images. What I like about Aviary's mobile app is that unlike Instagram you don't have to register or join any social networks.

To capture quick audio recordings try AudioBoo for Android and iOS devices.

To organize your gallery of B-roll media try using DropItToMe to have students contribute to a DropBox folder. If you're working in a Google Apps for Education environment use shared folders in Google Drive.

The Project 365 app for iPhone and iPad provides a place to organize your images in a calendar format and share you images via Facebook, Twitter, and email. The "pro" version of the app ($0.99) removes advertising, includes image cropping tools, and offers immediate upload to your Flickr account.

The YouTube Upload Widget installed on your blog or website is a good tool for collecting video clips that your students have recorded. To install the YouTube Upload Widget you do have to be somewhat comfortable with HTML. My HTML skills are crude but I was still able to install the widget into a test blog by following YouTube's documentation here.