Collaborate in class with Omeka

Have you thought about using Omeka.net with your students this fall? With one-click options to install plugins, sites are quick to set-up and easy to manage. Your students can sign up for their own Omeka.net accounts and build their own sites as well as collaborate on sites which you own. Small groups can work together to describe resources and build exhibits. You can even use Omeka.net to create a repository of sources to use as a teaching resource.

While the basic plan gives you a site and great plugins to work with, purchasing a paid Omeka.net plan offers increased storage as well as opportunities to do more with your and your students’ content.

Want to build a collecting site, gathering materials from a community – your town, the university or college community? With the Plus plan ($49/year, 1GB storage), you have access to the Contribution and Simple Contact Form plugins. With Contribution, your students can create forms to collect images, stories, video, and more, and decide what metadata to collect for each item type. The SimpleContact gives contributors an easy way to get in touch with questions without having direct access to anyone’s email address. Also included with the Plus plan is the Simple Vocab plugin, which allows you to create controlled vocabularies for metadata elements, a useful option when multiple people are creating content.

Want to use maps to geolocate items, to explore historical landscapes? Using Geolocation enables location metadata for every item, with the option to include a browsable map of every item on the site in your main navigation. With the plugin you can also add map blocks to exhibits, adding another method of interpretation to those presentations. Geolocation is available with the Silver plan ($99/year, 5GB storage), which also allows you to build up to five sites. The Silver plan also includes CSS Editor, allowing you to tweak the appearance of the site beyond simply selecting a theme, and HTML5 Media for enhanced audiovisual support.

If you envision creating multimedia-heavy installations, you might consider the Gold plan ($299/year), which gives you 5GB of data, as media files tend to take up a fair amount of server space.

Perhaps your entire department is ready to make the move into the world of digital work. Then, the Platinum plan ($999/year), with 25GB of storage and an unlimited number of sites, might be right for you.

If you or your students want to be able to get content out of the sites at the end of the semester, the Omeka API Import plugin offers an easy way to transfer the content of one Omeka site to another, whether on Omeka.net (Silver plans and higher) or on a standalone installation.

Have you used Omeka.net for classroom or small group collaboration? Tell us about your experience!

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