Magic Studio

New SILVER module available

2010-04-27T09:41:38Z

We have made a new SILVER prototype module on Leadership available for testing at: http://prototype3.silver.magicstudio.com/login/signup_finish

Why not give it a try and find out what type of Leader you are! You can leave feedback about SILVER here:

http://silvereducation.wordpress.com/2010/04/26/user-testing-prototype-3-leadership/

Magic Studio availability 15 March

2010-03-15T19:21:43Z

We experienced some performance and outage issues this morning Monday 15th March. The issues mainly affected asset upload and ‘create’ functionality and the service was unavailable for approximately one hour.

The problems were caused by bandwidth/availability issues at our hosting facility and were rectified by 12.30pm. We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused to our user community.

New Magic Twitter, Facebook and social bookmarking goes live

2010-02-03T18:16:20Z

Magic has provided links to these Social Bookmark services for a while via the AddThis widget and thats been handy. However, a few weeks back we decided to make things even easier to share and now you can share directly from Magic. For Facebook sharers, we are also now passing a nice Magic Thumbnail across to your Facebook Profile along with useful metadata from Magic about the item.

So its now just a single click to share any Magic resource you like the look of via a Tweet or into Digg and Delicious.

We like to share so we hope you like this new and improved feature as well.

English Heritage channel tops 6500 resources

2010-02-02T10:45:47Z

Our content partners at English Heritage have made over 1000 new resources available to the Magic Studio network through their English Heritage channel. This brings the total number of resources from EH to over 6500.

The content comes via a live SOAP feed from the Heritage Explorer website, meaning that Magic Studio users also benefit from the contextual and metadata information authored by the English Heritage education team in Swindon.

The new content comes from counties all over England, with images from Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Derbyshire, North Yorkshire, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Somerset and Shropshire.

All of the material is licenced for use free of charge with the Magic Studio network, with links to related resources from other content providers and users.

New Magic Release goes live

2010-01-27T10:10:20Z

Yesterday evening a new release of Magic Studio went live – this release includes a number of enhancements, including:

new home page design
new object view page
navigation moved to the top of the page (from the right)
a new ‘Full Screen’ button is incorporated in the top right corner of all interactives

We hope you enjoy the new changes!

Resources for Ancient Greece

2009-12-02T16:38:05Z

We’re working with schools to bring together some useful assets and interactives to help with the teaching of Ancient Greece at Key Stage 2. So far we’ve been adding public domain and other licensed images to Magic Studio, and we’ve also added a few interactive resources (some from us and some from Schoolzone). We’ve made two bundles, one of the images and one of the interactives – just search for “greek” or “greece” and select “Bundles” under Options and you’ll find it. If you have any comments please let us know, in the meantime we’ll be adding some more assets and interactives over the coming weeks ready for the new term after Christmas.

Digital Content for schools: new content upload/API

2009-10-23T09:57:07Z

In partnership with SchoolZone, we are looking for a number of content
collections (images, audio, video) who are willing to make their
material available free of charge to engage with an online network of
80,000 teachers.

If you can provide us with a web feed (Atom, OAI, RSS) or already have
your content in YouTube, Flickr or Picasa, we can pull it (and the
metadata) directly into the Magic Studio Network free of charge. We
are happy to take small or large feeds, as long as the content is
relevant to the curriculum (primary or secondary). Content is then
made available to teachers and students within the network, free for
educational use only.

In return, we provide you with a web-based interface that allows you to:

manage your feed(s) and generate branded channels of content
set specific licensing terms
build your own interactive learning resources
collaborate with teachers online
interrogate and generate detailed user statistics from the network
automatically watermark your images
add more education-specific metadata and curriculum tags

If you are interested in taking part, please contact us.

Magic Studio launches the Content Exchange

2009-09-29T15:10:38Z

Exciting news for us today as our Content Exchange goes live! Sitting alongside the free content, the Content Exchange also provides our users with a “pay for use” model, allowing you to take advantage of the increasing number of new commercial content providers in the Magic Studio Network.

How does it work? Just use a credit card to create a Magic Studio account with a minimum payment of £2 – your account will immediately be credited with Magic Studio Credits to the value of 10p each, so £2 will buy you 20 Magic Studio Credits. These credits can then be used to buy commercially available content from publishers in our network, allowing you to decide how much or how little you buy based on your own needs.

There are already over 337,000 items available in the Content Exchange and we’ll be adding more over the coming weeks.

Update: New Flash Player 10 Plugin

2009-09-26T10:54:48Z

We have now deployed the updates to Magic Studio for the new version of the plugin for Flash Player 10 (version 10,0,32,18). If you’re using an older version of the Flash Player plugin, Magic Studio will continue to work as normal. Thanks again for your patience.

Upload & Create now available

2009-09-11T14:18:59Z

As some of you will know, we’ve been experiencing a few technical issues this week which meant we had to temporarily turn off the upload and creation of new content. We’re happy to say that everything is back and working as it should be now. Thanks for bearing with us during this time and our apologies for any inconvenience caused.