Mediathread is an innovative platform for exploration, analysis and organization of web-based multimedia content.
Your students can create multimedia essays with embedded video clips and annotated images.
Mediathread is used at the Teachers College for student teachers to review and analyze video footage of early childhood mathematics teaching in the classroom.
At the Columbia University School of Social Work, first-year students use Mediathread to connect class readings to videos of clinical sessions and role-play assignments. Read more
"Projecting the American Empire on Film" is a course at Barnard College in which Mediathread is used for a series of close reading exercises of film footage. Read more
A course on Tibetan Material Culture is now able to combine extremely granular annotation of Tibetan object images with a sequential, analytic framework -- a framework that includes direct comparison with other objects as well as videos of objects being used in ritual and daily life.
A seminar on the History of Epidemiology at the School of Public Health is asking students to harvest representations of epidemiological events from a range of public websites, and connect these images and video to scientific literature in order to deepen historical understanding of these human traumas.
A course on social studies pedagogy in Teachers College is using Mediathread to engage young teachers in building sophisticated multimedia lesson plans, lessons that draw on a range of interviews, news footage, and fictional portrayals of the Vietnam War.
Mediathread connects to a variety of image and video collections (such as YouTube, Flickr, library databases, and course libraries), enabling users to lift items out of these collections and into an analysis environment.
Since Mediathread is compatible with image as well as video objects, it liberates analysis from the constraints of any one collection or format.
Instructors are able to queue up digital collections that are pertinent to a given course, ask students to explore these collections, and select items to analyze with a click of a button
In Mediathread, items can then be clipped, annotated, organized, and embedded into essays and other written analysis.
The Mediathread bookmarklet is easily added to any web browser with a quick drag-and-drop.
Whenever a student then clicks this bookmarklet, an item from a compatible library is imported into a course-associated Mediathread site, where it can then be tagged, annotated, clipped, and embedded into projects and discussion threads.
Students can compose essays or written analysis enhanced with video clips or annotated images.
The web-based editor allows them to embed these clips or images inline with the written discourse.
The media assets can be browsed right within the editing window and with one-click added to the essay.
A customized home page helps students track work being done by their classmates on shared items and projects.
Instructors may also publish announcements, assignments, and model projects to the home page.
Work in Mediathread can be shared with classmates or larger audiences, requiring students to formalize thinking, clarify interpretations, and improve arguments with evidence.
Mediathread especially supports collaborative work within a class. Groups of students can build essays and other types of projects together, incorporating items that they have collected.
Members of a class can see what other members have imported, clipped, and annotated from libraries; students can even incorporate annotations made by others into discussions and projects.
Cross-class tagging helps students discover common themes and interests: peer-to-peer discovery centered on items being analyzed. In fact, Mediathread alerts a student whenever an item she has analyzed is also being analyzed by a classmate, or cited in a class discussion.
The mere availability of video alone is not sufficient to improve educational outcomes; pedagogical approaches to video that encourage close reading through annotation and composition may help do so.
These methods encourage students to treat video sources critically as raw material for discourse and analysis.
