Create Sophisticated Unique Digital Learning Content With Ease Using This Powerful Free Multimedia Tool
What Is Metta?
Metta (www.metta.io) is a digital storytelling tool that allows you to create lessons using audio, videos, and images from your computer or from the web. It is a great online app for creating short flipped or blended lessons for students to help them learn outside of the classroom.
With this outstanding web application, teachers can easily create a digital content based story, supplemented with images and text. Teachers can also include poll questions in order to test the knowledge of students. So, with Metta, you can easily combine multimedia elements together to produce an awesome digital lesson.
How To Use Metta
- For using the Metta app, you first need to create an account or login using your Facebook id.
- After you log in, you’ll be presented with a screen where you need to enter the title of your story or lesson. When you enter the title, a dropdown menu appears which includes options such as “From Scratch,” “Quick Try” and “RSS driven Blog Teaser” for selecting your story type. The ‘From Scratch’ option allows you to search for or add your own content in the story. ‘Quick Try’ loads a sample story and allows you to customize it. By selecting the ‘RSS driven blog teaser’, you will be required to enter a URL that will let you create a playable teaser and add your own audio to it.
- Once you’ve entered the title and selected your story type, all you have to do is to search for images, videos, sounds and text on the web, or drag these files from your desktop to insert them into your story or presentation. You can also paste the link from the web to an image or video in the search bar at the top.
- If you want to cut or edit a portion of your story, you can use the video trimmer at the bottom of the screen to select the length of the video you want to use in your story/presentation. Similarly, for editing the audio, you can use the bar below the video trimmer.
- Your story has a cover image followed by some chapters which can be further divided into different sections, with each section having different pictures or text. The videos and sounds run through all the chapters with the breakpoints in between. After all the chapters have been arranged in order, you can easily add, trim, edit or delete a chapter, add or delete media, record a sound, add a poll or rearrange the order of the chapters.
- Finally, save your presentation and preview it. Publish it so that other users can like, follow and share it on social media websites.
[Editors Note: I used Metta to put together the video below as an exercise in getting familiar with the tool. I struggled a little with it at first until I realized each clip has to have it’s own video (an image and text alone doesn't really work right). Also, if you want to have a presentation that has different text or a different accompanying image over different parts of the video, you can do that within one clip. Anyway, it takes some getting used to, and I found the Help helpful! It took me about 15 minutes to figure it out and create this simple example. – KW]
Metta Example
A short video supplemented with an image and some text, followed by a short clip from another video, with the text changing part of the way through. Click the green arrow in the lower right corner to play it.
Using Metta in the Classroom
The teaching and learning content creation possibilities for an application like this are only limited by the availability of video content and your imagination. Select parts of videos from YouTube and assemble them into your own custom-annotated lesson. With additional functionality like Polls and Comments, and the ability to embed this content into other web pages, you can easily create your own digital lessons with interactive elements. Pretty powerful for a free tool (note that there are paid plans available to provide more poll responses and storage).
Here’s a few helpful features that make Metta more powerful for classroom use:
- Polls – insert quick polls and quizzes into your stories, video lessons and slides, and share them with students and other viewers. Polls are a great way to test the understanding and knowledge of students about a particular topic. Teachers can include multiple choice questions in the polls as well to determine how well students have understood the material. (The free plan only allows for 10 repsonses, so you may need an paid plan, which run as low as $7 or $8 per month, to leverage the polls function as you wish).
- Statistics – get controlled feedback of the polling results using statistics in order to know about the detailed reactions and responses of the students, and keep track of who, when and where answered the questions on a geographically-varying scale. This is one of the most useful features for teachers. When students respond to a particular poll question, teachers can easily view how many students answered it correctly, and the amount of time they spent answering it.
- Another cool feature of Metta is the Collect button. This lets you collect media (videos, images and text) using a powerful Bookmarklet while you’re browsing the web. The “Collect Button” is actually a Meta button that can be easily installed on your web browser as an ‘add-on’ and allows you to collect images or videos from the web that you can use to insert in your presentation. You can easily drag this button to your bookmarks toolbar and click it when you wish to store specific content to use later on for your stories.
Related Posts (if the above topic is of interest, you might want to check these out):
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8 Great Free Digital Presentation Tools For Teachers To Try …
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