SAS Digital Leaders Unite!

I have started sharing each Friday some of the great tech integration projects my teachers have been busy working on with their students. It is hard for teachers to get into each other’s classrooms so I figured I would take it to them. Here was my first attempt.

I have started to send out a weekly Friday tech roundup to staff. Here is the first installment

Hey all,
I just wanted to showcase a couple great projects this week. I also want to make this a weekly email thing to showcase the great work going on in all grades of the ES and to share ideas among colleagues. Thanks to Sheehan for the idea and motivation.

**First, hats off to 3BR for completing two different digital photostories in two days. The first link is to an example of a personal narrative that students in her class made using Kidpix to illustrate three pics (beginning, middle, and end) of their personal narrative and MS Photostory to put narration over the pictures and turn it into a movie.
http://portal.saschina.org/video/media/7859/3BR_Dylan_Narrative/

**Second, 3rd grade has been studying bones and muscles so 3BR made group photostories using images of different joints pulled from the Internet. They put these into MS Photostory, narrated them using a script that group members came up with, and saved them as movies. THE BEST PART, THIS PROJECT WAS COMPLETELY DONE BY STUDENTS. After the narrative photostory the kids had the basics of manipulating the software down and were able to fly through this second assignment. Another advantage, they had to script out the narration, a great way to incorporate tech into your writer’s/reader’s workshop activities/lessons.
http://portal.saschina.org/video/media/7968/3BR_Skeleton/

**Last, but not least, a little tech that you might use for your personal life. The holiday season is upon us and it can be tough buying gifts for family back home.  Fear not. Grandma and Grandpa will love receiving a photo book of your kids and your adventures on this side of the world. Blurb can help.  Keep reading for their link and a description of their services

Blurb is a self-publishing service that allows you to make glossy, professional-grade photo books. This way, you can solve the problem of the hundreds of digital photos sitting in some forgotten folder on your computer and share them with those who are close to you.

http://www.blurb.com

Start by downloading their software (it took no time at all) and you are on your way creating your photo books for Grams and Gramps. Hi-res photos take a little time to load, but their system is intuitive and the editing process is fun. A week after you finish they’ll ship you an art store-quality book with your photos (and words) spread across the pages.

As always, have fun and keep the tires on the road.

I had the chance this week of seeing 5LH use some great tessellation sites in teaching math this week. Below are three sites she used. The first is worth a look as it kind of outlines the process of how MC Escher came to use tesselations in his artwork as well as serving as an abridged version of his life. If you like tessellations or the work of MC Escher these sites are worth a look.

Tessellations.org

Cool Math4Kids

Interactivate

Watch the video below to find out how to embed video from the portal into your blog post. You can also use this process to embed a google calendar of your assignements onto a page in your blog just like the MS Principal’s Blog Calendar page! Also, use this process to embed an iPhoto slideshow as shown in this previous blog post! In a nutshell:

1. Go to Plugins and activite the EmbedIt plugin
2. Type the following – make sure your use caps: [HTML1]
3. Scroll down to Custom Fields and click on Enter New
4. Type the following in to the field: HTML1
5. Paste the code from the video into Value field

Voila!

[HTML2]

I think everybody will get a lot out of this blog post! As we all use the new wordpress more and more, let’s share what we learn.

Today’s Learning – Uploading PDFs to Blogs!

1) Click on the insert (Add an image) icon, and select the PDF you want to upload from the computer.

2) Edit the Title, Caption, Description and Link URL as desired. Under Link URL you will see buttons for “None”, “File URL”, and “Post URL”.

4) Click on “File URL”. This is IMPORTANT as it is what will add the “link” portion of the file to your post. Otherwise, the text will simply appear in the post but with no link.

5) Click on “Insert into Post”.

You did it!

If you would like to print out these directions, please click on the PDF Link below!

Uploading PDFs into Blog Posts

WHAT’S DNA? by Helen, Mona, John, and Shawn
I asked a student today if she was planning on submitting a film to the Shanghai Student Film Festival that will take place here on campus next month. She said, “No. I just like making stuff on the computer.” Too bad, she’s produced some very high quality work. In a wide range of classes, students are taking advantage of the technology available to them to share what they’ve learned about a given topic. From short films that illustrate an 8th Grader’s understanding of DNA to digital stories about a proud accomplishment, students and teachers are developing an important set of visual and media literacy skills. What I like most about lessons that involve some type of multimedia end-product (particularly digital stories) is how they shift the focus of the learning to the student where they become director and producer, not just passive consumers of disjointed bits of information. This is what I hope technology can do for schools. From Literacy in the Digital World by Kathleen Tyner (still my most referenced resource for educational technology issues):

The basic paradigm shift is from an educational emphasis on people as recipients of information and knowledge to an emphasis on people as participants in the creation of information and knowledge…The..choice we face nationally and globally is to decide what proportion of people will experience a level and kind of education that will enable them to participate as producers of knowledge as well as its consumers.

My Proudest Moment by Gordon

Making glitzy multimedia projects is rarely any teacher’s objective. What is often overlooked is that there is much to learn about the language of moving images that does not require assigning students to make a movie. These are a few simple activities that students and teachers can practice as part of a lesson that will develop important digital literacy skills for the future:

• Show only a short scene of a movie in class and point out basic camera angles
• Swap the soundtrack of a movie for one that alters the mood
• Use still images and ask students to assign captions (Comic Life is great for this!)
• Try a few of the exercises from the guide the British Film Institute published a few years ago

Visual Literacy researcher, Judy Baca summarized the importance of visual literacy: “In our increasing visually driven society, the ability to create and interpret imagery is as imperative as the abilities to read and write and to listen and speak. In addition to print, television, movies, and signs, young children deal on a daily basis with computers, educational video games, and the Internet-all media requiring a high degree of visual literacy to cope with a sometimes overwhelming amount of information. Baca’s studies also reminds us that the use of “visuals” touches other areas, including thinking and learning, and constructing meaning” (Baca, J., Braden, R., 1990, p.1)

As teachers and students here at SAS transition to a 1:1 laptop environment, I think we’ll see an increase in opportunities for students to create digital media products that share information. Initially, not all of them will be effective in communicating to their intended audience. Just because we put a computer in front of a student does not mean that it will teach them the visual literacy skills mentioned above. But now that the students have the access to tools for easily producing engaging digital media projects, we can now help students develop these essential skills for a digital future.

Find more videos like this on SAS Professional Development Net

It has been a while so my last post so what better thing to do on a Friday then recap what has been happening in grade 1,3, and 5 with Technology. Grade 1 is busy working on a global writing project that uses a wiki to coordinate schools on three different continents. The monster project is a creation of Anna Baralt Ann Oro and has been running for 2 years now.  The project while very simple, is an effective way for teachers to have their students practice creative writing and having their works published to a larger audience.  The students get to connect with schools around the world, meet new people virtually, and share their work. Kids here at SAS will write their descriptions of their monster-from their imagination.  These descriptions get passed on to the class’ partner school and vice versa.  From the partner descriptions the students receive they have to draw a picture of their partners monster based solely on the descriptive writing that their partner has provided.  Easy but certainly not elementary.  Tying in descriptive writing and art, this project really is an excellent opportunity for the kids to use their imaginations, to create something uniquely theirs and to share it with someone half way around the world and then to be able to discuss it.  All in first grade.

Grade 3 has some great things happening with student blogging.  4 classes are up and running with blogging-3HJ, 3JK, 3LH, 3BR.  Please take time to visit these blogs and see the great poetry the 3rd graders are publishing and feel free to leave a comment for the kids.  They would love the format and the motivation that comes from knowing someone from outside of their class is reading their words is priceless.

On another note, 3MM is working inside a secure social networking space called ning.  Think of ning as a mini-facebook that people can set up to discuss and share common interests.  In the case of 3MM they will be working on their community projects inside of ning.  What a great idea to work on community issues while participating in a virtual community online.  This project represents a big leap forward in terms of the way a class and unit can be taught as well as a leap of faith by Mr. Mataio to experiment with a very new way of doing something.  I am really looking forward to developing this unit more with 3MM and can’t wait to see what ideas get produced for the collaboration that can now take place between students and their teacher from anywhere, anytime.  An added bonus of the ning site is that when Mr. Mataio is out for a few days when he has his baby, he can still carry on with class from home. Unfortunately for you, readers of this blog (anyone out there?) the 3MM class ning is a private space for only kids and teachers to interact.  We do this to keep the students safe while still allowing them these valuable, 21st century learning opportunities.

Grade 5 continues to plug away on Reading Olympics and their Invention Convention project.  The grade five teachers have set up a Reading Olympics wiki to serve as sort of a one stop shop for Reading Olympics.  Students can now access all the R.O. information that they need to have from anywhere, anytime. They can also post their work and projects here as well as add reader reviews of books that they have read. 5KC is also using the wiki to develop sentences with images around their spelling lists. This allows groups of students to collaborate on word lists in a common place and allows them to discuss the best ways of conveying a words meaning to their classmates.

All in all a lot of new and exciting things happening.  Collaboration and creativity at the heart of it, two very important characteristics of 21st century learning all made possible with different web 2.0 applications.

TGiF–

A few months ago, I set a goal for this year to help produce 500 digital stories. I’m 75 digital stories closer to the finish line. With the Spanish digital stories and now this set, I’m at about 120. But it’s not about the numbers.

The most recent project involved the 6th Grade and focused on an accomplishment or proud moment. The project team consisted of four classroom teachers, myself and two very patient and flexible computer lab teachers. I met with the classroom teachers prior to launching the project and walked them through the process of completing a digital story. I’m a big fan of providing students with a template of what you expect them to complete, in addition to sharing with them a a finished digital story that illustrates what you expect them to do. For both Windows MovieMaker and iMovie (one class worked in the Mac Lab), I created a template where the students would open it and then have each step of the project illustrated for them in a short video. Still not sure how effective this was, but it cut down on requiring me to give a lot of direction instruction in MovieMaker and iMovie.

We met for 40 minutes each day. Spent about ten days writing our stories. Each student has a blog so we had them post a draft of their story to their blog and then told students to read and comment on each other’s stories. Not surprisingly, 6th graders are not the most effective story coaches. It’s still a  big challenge for a teacher to provide timely feedback to each student, but I find that this is what makes the difference between a narrated slideshow and an effective digital story. After students used Audacity to record their voice overs, they exported them as an mp3 and uploaded it to their blog to receive feedback on that. The feedback was sparse as many students were eager to move on to gathering images for their story and did not leave that many comments for the audio version of the story. The student’s voice is the most engaging part of a digital story. Unfortunately, schools are not quiet places. We don’t have that many quiet spaces and even with designating empty classrooms as quiet recording spaces, students still had some background noise in their voice overs. The kids can filter it out, but most adults stop listening once you hear some other voice in the background or the papers rustling. Next time, I think I’ll tighten that process by using a schedule with time slots. The teachers can help by listening to students read the first section of their story aloud and if they sound ready, the student’s name would be added to the recording queue. During the recording, we could pair each student with an adult or student who has just completed his recording who will oversee the process and ensure that the environment is quiet. The voice over is too valuable to leave to the student to handle alone.

I think a key component of this project was the flexibility of the
teachers. We had a window of about a month’s time for the project, but
everybody wanted quality work and extended the time for students to
write and receive feedback on their stories. I’d much rather spend more
time on the script writing and less on making the final movie look more
polished. Few students used music or transitions and I don’t think we
lost much. In total, I think the project took 6 weeks.

We uploaded the completed digital stories to our school YouTube channel. It was the easiest place to put them all (although I don’t like all of the Promoted Videos that come up when you try to watch a kid-friendly movie). More resources here on this wiki for Digital Storytelling.

Today at the Parent Coffee Kris Sheehan, Dan Everett, and I presented Internet Safety-Guidlines to keep your child safe online. The slides from the presentation can be viewed below. While our presentation only scratched the surface of this topic, I felt like it did a nice job of introducing parents to the topic, giving them startegies to use at home, and a number of good resources and web sites to use along side their children at home. Likewise, after the presentation, we opened it up to questions and comments. Some of what was shared and asked during this session was great as some parents shared experiences, both good and bad, that they have had in the past with their kids and online safety and how to structure a home to facilitate sound technological practices with their kids. I really enjoy these opportunities to interact with parents at events like these, to bring them into these conversations. It makes them as stakeholders in the school and what we do here feel a part of it and it allows us to validate why integrating technology here at school, so important.

Have you ever needed to capture a portion of your computer’s screen and save it to a file? I do it quite frequently. Whether it would be a photo on a web page, a quick “how-to,” or just something I need to archive, screen capturing applications can be handy tools, especially useful for blogs or PowerPoint presentations.

The problem is, that most of the time, I don’t need the ENTIRE screen, just merely a portion of the real estate. On the Mac, this is easy; just hold down COMMAND + SHIFT + 4 and cross hairs appear to allow you to click and drag your desired area to be captured. On Windows, it’s a bit more involved. Pressing the PrintScreen button will capture the entire screen onto the clipboard, but you must launch another application, such as Photoshop or Paint to paste and THEN crop. If you do a LOT of screen capturing, that takes a LOT of time. I’ve come across two applications that make it just as easy to screen capture on Windows as it is on the Mac.

I’ve been using Faststone Screen Capture 5.3 for awhile now, and it is efficient and very easy to use. It allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. You can choose to send captures to editor, file, clipboard, or printer. (Later versions allow you to save to Word or PowerPoint, but they are shareware, i.e. $).

I mainly use the rectangular/freehand option and save to file (.JPEG format), which seems sufficient and effective enough.

The second application is called Jing, and is limited to just selecting a rectangular area, but it has some cool features FSCapture is missing. After cropping your selection, Jing allows you to do mark-ups, i.e. add text, highlight sections, etc. Below is a great screencast that illustrates this:

Jing also allows you to do motion captures, such as record PowerPoint presentations with audio. It is also available for the Mac. There is a small caveat, though; you must sign up for a free account at Screencast.com. But after that, the software is pretty unobtrusive.

Whichever you choose, you now have two more options when it comes to screen capturing.

Downloads:
Faststone Capture5.3
Jing

Microsoft has never been accused of creating the most intuitive software. Let’s face it, how many of you spent several minutes trying to find where they put the “File” menu in Word 2007? (If you’re still looking, it’s that little ball in the upper left hand corner.)

Another case in point is how in the heck do you change the default template to your preferred font, style, and page layout? Seems easy enough; clicking on the expansion icons in the font/paragraph/page layouts gives you a default button. Click it and you’re done, right. Not so fast. There’s a little more tweaking to be done, but once your finished, you can say zai jian to Calibri and one inch margins. Watch the screencast to see how it’s done.

There may be other ways of creating a default template. If you know of one, please share.
- p.mcmahon