iaza and prezi

I've had a play around iaza, a simple to use and free online image editor.

It was The Book Chook's suggestion, and she has written a number of posts about using image editors for literacy teaching that are worth a read.

I found the program very classroom (and CRT) friendly as it doesn't require any login and it is easy to use a file or a web sourced image - so, you don't even need a camera in order to use it.

I've used prezi as a kind of album to display the photos I made on iaza. Prezi, a web-based alternative to powerpoint has a free basic model that older primary students could enjoy, but it requires an email address to make an account. (Also, there is a 30-day free trial of the offline program available). The website has a number of video tutorials and examples to get people started and I found them informative enough to make this without any other guidance. It is a slightly idiosyncratic program, so kids will probably need a number of sessions to get the hang of it and make anything. Could be useful for story-boarding, making comics, and organising information.

This embedded prezi seems to take most of a million years to load (and even then struggles). You can also view it through the prezi site. Click on this sentence to find it there!

I highly recommend checking it out.

iaza.com on Prezi

Bookmark: Twitter for teachers

I'm just (very tentatively) beginning with twitter. I want to use it for professional conversations and political participation, and follow a few of my favourite public commentators. It seems a bit full-on at the moment and I worry a bit about privacy and security.

Some useful resources:

Plain speak intro to twitter

List of useful ed hashtags

#DUedchat 7pm thursdays, Down Under edchat

For once I have the basics down, some advanced twitter skills for teachers

Kids blogging:

Comments for kids

Useful youtube vid about adding multiple users to edublogger

bookmark: online privacy

Just bookmarking these for future considerations about online transparency vs privacy:

Transparency as Pedagogy

5 reasons why your online presence will replace your resume in 10 years.

More about public/private borderlines and writing

Memoir as suicide by Susan Bradley Smith

Delicious Library 2.0

I've been trying to find a database program that I can use to catalogue of all the childrens' literature that I read. A tool to help out with those moments of searching for that perfect book that you read that time, with the mouse and the... maybe it wasn't a mouse, some kind of animal... it had a yellow cover... it would be perfect for this unit/kid/age.. if only the librarian could read my useless hand waving...

For each book, I wanted to record the title, author, two or three summary sentences and reminder of what it can be used for, and up to about 6 tags (probably themes, key phonics, genre, ...), in the hope that I could search by title, author, or tags... and find the book!

An easy way to do it would be to create a blog, and have each book as an entry, and use the tags to do all the organising. Unfortunately then I'd need internet connection to access the list, and when I'm relief teaching, that might be a pain. Also, I was sort of self-conscious about creating web junk. It's not going to be a resource worth sharing, there are fantastic wiki-style websites where people properly review and catergorise literature. My database would be merely an electronic (therefore searchable, expandable, transportable) version of a box of file cards, organised and expressed with a logic all of my own. No need to display that.

So anyway,

I'm trialling my friend's suggestion, Delicious Library 2.o. It's only available for Macs and if I like it, I will need to part with US$40.

Advantages: 1) Its stand out cool feature is that for most books, I don't need to type in any of the standard details. I just hold the barcode of the book in front of my inbuilt camera and it reads the barcode! Then the program contacts amazon.com to get the cover pic, all publishing details, summary, reviews, and even a list of other titles by the same author. Beautiful! 2) There's space for me to add my own notes (though annoyingly it wont let me do paragraph breaks). 3) The display is very attractive:

Annoying features: 1) There is no tagging function. I am able to catergorise books by creating "shelves" but that requires me to drag and drop books one by one. 2) There is no text based search function? I think? There is supposed to be a speech recognition search function but it doesn't seem to like me or work or something... or maybe I'm not doing it right, not sure. 3) Within shelves I can't reorder the books and it orders them alphabetically according to the author's first name. 4) 4 of the 5 Australian books that I have tried to input have not been identified by the amazon database. They're common books, one is by a major Australian writer, and yet they didn't register. They are the grey blocks where covers should be in the pic above.

So I'm feeling a bit ambivalent about it. Love the visuals and surely that will be an important compensation for the lack of searchability. Love how quickly and easily the scanning happens - it's better than I ever imagined. I think it will do the job of helping me recall books I've read. But then I just feel perplexed by the lack of tagging and search function...

Will trial it for a little longer and keep looking at alternatives.

Week 5 - Dfilm

This week's workshop was a flying sweep through a swag of sites where students can make avatars, comics, and short films. Here's a rundown...

dfilm.com

I made this short animation on dfilm.com using MovieMaker v2. It uses the "chase" format which is why the characters skim across the screen at the start and end. The program is not suitable for primary students because one of the available characters is highly sexualised. P.S. the super annoying music will stop when the animation stops...

Build your wild self:

www.buildyourwildself.com
Presented by New York Zoos and Aquarium, this is a sweet little activity where you create a character (or avatar) with animal parts. When you're done, short descriptions of the different animal parts are provided. They are interesting little vignettes in themselves and I can imagine some students getting right into it - think of the kid who won't put down Ripley's or The Guinness Book, this activity is for them! Students could be challenged to create a super animal that wou

ld be their ideal fantastical pet...

reasonablyclever.com:


I made my lego self on this website in the "kid-safe mini-mizer". This could be used in the beginning of the year as part of the suite of activities where students introduce themselves. The instruction could be "Make yourself as a lego character and write about a day in your favourite lego world." It might be a way to get beyond the usual 'I have a dog. I like swimming...' An open-ended imaginative task and a way for some kids to share something deeper.

xtranormal.com

This movie making animation program is extra user-friendly. The buttons are easy to use. The preview generator only takes about one minute to load and you can still make changes while it's loading. I'm impressed.

As a classroom activity it is suitable for upper primary students as it is easier to navigate if you are a proficient reader. Students will need to create an account in order to use it and that requires an email address.

catchmentdetox.com.au

This is a very sophisticated and detailed program where students play to increase the population and income of their catchment while managing the environmental impacts of their choices. This site is different to all the others we have looked at in this class because I don't think it would be given justice (or that kids would even like it) unless it was supported by a decent sized inquiry unit on water, land management, rivers or similar.

Given my background in conservation and land management, I might be at risk of over-thinking the program (and this topic in general), but I would like to use it in a way that honours its sophistication... The site provides lots of links and information about catchment processes which would support teachers but most of it is probably too dense and dry for students to negotiate independently (unless, of course, they had a special passion). I would like to see students (grade 6+) work in small groups which could be further broken down so that each student represented an 'interest' group within the community because the main task of catchment authorities in real life is mediating different interest groups. The game could run for the duration of the unit with students documenting the changes they make as they learn more about catchments.

toondoo.com

Maybe I'm just getting tired but I found this program laborious. Students could sign up for a free account or the site offers secure forums for classroom groups for a fee. It was quick and easy to create the account but again, kids would need an email account to sign up.

This simple little comic was easy enough to create but my earlier attempts were frustrating - the site first suggested that I use Commonwealth Games themed characters and then hid the icons from me. Another annoying feature is that you can't resize the characters... grrr.

VOKI and the ultranet

I've spent a couple of days at "lead users" training for the ultranet with my mentor teacher. I'm being introduced to a whole swag of new (well, new for me anyway) internet places and skills.. Hope this works...


Get a Voki now!



The significant learning for me in posting this voki was copying the html code in.

Estelle the ultranet coach also put me onto a couple of great sites.
jesseportfolio.wikispaces.com is a great example of a student e portfolio. It's maker, Jess, is still in high school in New Zealand. I get the impression she has become a bit of a star on the conference circuit... She has used glogster to create attractive pages - it is a web based e-poster making site where you can make electronic collages by combining graphics, video, music and as many buttons as you can imagine. (www. glogster.com - check it out)
Jess has even made a video tutorial showing others how to do it.

debsplace.wikispaces.com is a site designed to inspire teachers about incorporating ICT in the classroom. The site is written by Deb Hicks, another of the Ultranet coaches in the Western region. Site addresses the question: What might best practice eLearning look like? It has lots of great tips and ideas, like, heaps! It is a first point of call for research about anything ICT-education related as she has linked her extensive delicious account to her tutorial pages... it is really inspirational stuff.

Week 4 - Two brolgas + an m&m pie

Brolga Song

This storyboard is a retell from of an indigenous dreaming story animation from the ABC's Dustechoes site (abc.net.au/dustechoes). It was made using the diagram function in Inspiration 8IE. The stills where cut down from screen shots in Paint. My friend showed me how to export an image from Inspiration. I found this task a fresh take on the retell, suitable for grades 4 up.

Dust echoes is a rich collection of indigenous stories. The twelve animations are each a few minutes long. None of the stories that I looked at had any dialogue, but my tech savvy friend found that you can add some narration by clicking the "mash up" button on the main menu page. Short quizzes accompany each story and check for inferential comprehension. Detailed teacher notes (PDF) are most useful for understanding narrative complexities. They have some basic lesson suggestions. I'd recommend screening the stories before using these stories with primary children because some contain violent themes (see particularly Namorrodor).

Activity 2: Excel

A sophisticated twist on a classic classroom chance and data activity.

Tech skills involved: data entry and chart drawing, recoloring sections of the graph, adding a title, importing images from the m&m website, and resizing different components.

A real world, hands on activity. Extends easily into percentages and fractions, and graph literacy. Student might look at a variety of graphs for the same data set: are there some representations that distort the proportions? Are there some which communicate clearly? What happens as the data set gets bigger?

Anaphylaxis worries will prevent chocolates being used in many classrooms. Additionally, I have some hesitation about guiding my students through the m&m website which is child-targeted marketing of chocolates. Some alternatives that were suggested today are: confetti, plastic stars, counters chosen at random, play coins, lego pieces, soup mix. Of those, lego is probably my pick as they may be sorted in a number of ways - shape, colour and function - and is an educational and engaging activity in its own right.