Over the last year Aviary’s suite of tools has become one of my favorite free resources on the web. This week Aviary took another step up the ranks of my list of favorite free tools. This week Aviary launched, in beta, Aviary Education. Aviary Education will give teachers and students access to Aviary’s image editor, music creator, vector editor, and sound mixing service. Aviary Education will allow teachers to manage student accounts, give assignments, and messages all students at once within a private environment. Aviary Education is in beta and you do have to apply and be approved to use the new service. When you apply you do need to provide you school email address as well as the name and location of your school.

You can read about Aviary’s sound mixer Myna here. You can read about Aviary’s music creator Roc here. In the slideshow below you will see how to use Aviary Roc.

If you’re a Google Apps for Education school, you can add all of Aviary’s services to your Google Apps. Read about how to do that here.

Applications for Education
This year my students used Aviary’s Myna sound editor to make sound tracks for mini-documentary videos they made about the expansion of US borders during the 19th century. Roc is a relatively new offering from Aviary that will allow anyone to create music tracks. You can then take those Roc tracks and mix them with voice tracks in Myna to create an outstanding original sound track for a podcast or video.

The image editing tools offered by Aviary are great free, web-based, alternatives to the offerings of Photoshop.

Here are some related items that may be of interest to you:
How to Use YouTube’s New Video Editor
Free Guide – Making Videos on the Web
Five Ways Students Can Build Multimedia Timelines