Presenting work at DNI

At my visit to DNI we were looking at ways that teachers could use ICT tools for students to use to present work in different ways, most teachers felt that PowerPoint had really dominated as a presenting tool. We looked at several ways of presenting work on a wiki, through Comic Life, Glogster a web2 tool which creates digital posters and one of my favourites Blabberize. Blabberize is a really cool tool, kids love it and it is technically pretty simple. It is a shame that a lot of the time the fun and learning really stops at working out how it works and laughing at the end result. Blabberize can be a tool that the author presents information to an audience through particularly characters, making an impact about an important short message- for example sun-safety or any safety information.

It is also a great tool to present perspectives.
Working with Chris at DNI with Blabberize we discussed using this tool in Social Science. Students can take different perspectives and speak on each characters behalf on an issue they have been studying. One example we thought of was related to ANZAC day as Chris had just finished some work on this, the first picture the students upload could be soldiers, who give their perspectives, then perhaps family at home, then perhaps the generals who sent orders to attack the beach etc. If you haven’t heard of Blabberize have a play it is great fun, Vokis can be used in the same ways. A voki is an avatar that you create and then speak through.

Wiki Users

Kelvin at DNI made a wiki last year. It is really impressive. He was thinking about doing several blogs this year, one for each of his topic. After looking at the reason for having the blogs it seemed that he could just as easily extend how he is using his wiki, to include children to have own logins and wiki pages to manage.

Kelvin will set up a username and password for each child in his class and give them either their own wiki or pages on an additional wiki to work on and take ownership of. This way the huge amount of work he has done on his wiki is not at risk of his class accidentally deleting or shifting things around (although it is easy enough to fix these issues, it is an added hassle).

Kelvin can control what students can do within the main class wiki and on their own. He is taking his wiki to the next level, it’s pretty exciting stuff.

He has also been busy making movies for the DNEye version of ‘Stars in their Eyes”. He has been filming interviews with the students using a green screen background which he plans to change to flying stars etc as the contestants are interviewed. He has these shared on his wiki too.

Compound Learning

I worked briefly with Jackie at DNI on comic life today. Some of the children in her class showed me the amazing work they had done in paint and then used Comic life to put together little cartoons.

Jackie was surprised by comic life, although it takes a bit of fiddling around with to learn the skills used in Comic Life were the same skills she was had learnt in word using call outs and inserting pictures and text boxes. We discussed the transferability of ideas/ skills from one programme to another programme and how the learning in one compounds and increases your entry level into another programme.

That is one of the arguements I would have for someone who didn't feel they have enough time to learn new things and investing their time in new ICT learning, the benefits are continuious it is not a task that is an end in itself. Learning something new often saves you time when you are working on things in the future. Compound learning, investiging time at the beginning saves you time, or even gains you time in the future.

Researching

Today I worked with Stephanie at DNI. The topic they are studying is weather. She did some google searches and found a weather forum which had information she has been looking for. Best of all her class will be able to use the forum to post questions to a whole network of weather experts and enthusiasts. The weather forum connects to other useful sites like the Met Service site.

Stephanie has just had a projector put into her classroom and has started using it to share videos with her class. We also looked at some sites she might use for Maths and Science, the BBC Bitesize activities and the NZ Maths site (particularly the digital objects). We looked at teacher tube, as another resource to use video in the class. The teacher tube videos are ideal as they are short and because they have been made by teachers the learning is explicit.

Stephanie had lots of ideas about what to focus on for her action research. We spent some time looking at a few search engines for children rather than exclusively using google. As we looked also at getting information from experts and the LEARNZ site, Stephanie is sort of thinking about researching skills and different ways and resources to use for finding information for her topics throughout the year.
I'm looking forward to seeing what she decides.

Home and School Links

Moana at DNI has started a classroom blog. She wants a engaging way to get messages home about homework etc to parents. She thought a blog would be a good way of doing this.
Moana is a pretty fast learner and had mastered the basics of blogging quickly, we then looked for a few widgets for the blog, she felt that having some fun moving or interactive parts to the blog would mean that the students in her class would be more likely to visit the blog and also share it with their parents.

Here are a few websites Moana could start with to add some bling to her blog Suzie Vesper's wiki has heaps of information on blogs. This blog also has links in the right hand menu with great instructions to add heaps of things to your blog. Blog Backgrounds at this site and more blog backgrounds and bling at "the cutest blog on the block" site.

Science Fair

Jackie at DNI is getting her class to type up their work for their Science Fair presentations.

Today we worked on a few word functions to solve some of the problems Jackie and her class have been having.

As Jackie was trying out some of these new things she commented that she needed to do to learn, she closes programmes down when she has learnt a new skill and repeats it from the beginning several times to help her cement her new learning. We then talked a bit about similar learning techniques students need to uses to acquire new skills and how this varied between students. This understanding is at the core of our ICT contract,that teachers understand the independent learning process and they understand this and share their personal experiences in the learning process with their students. It is also about recognising that different students have different learning preferences and strengths and using these to enhance learning. It is great that Jackie has made that connection.

We worked on things like changing the page orientation, adding text boxes and callouts (speech bubbles). Hopefully Jackie and I will be able to team teach her class next time and work on some of the considerations the students need to put into making the most of what ICT can do to communicate their scientific findings. One thing that is frustrating about a lot of programmes is a lot of these great things are hidden away in toolbar menus. Spending time exploring these menus is a great way to work out what the programmes you have are really capable of doing.

DNI Sports wiki and blog

David and Chris at DNI school would like like a place for the students to celebrate their participation and achievements within sports teams at DNI.
They wanted a website which is easy for families and the students themselves to check on game times, draws and any other relevant information. They would also like something that the students could eventually take responsibility for and provide some news and student voice to the reporting of sport achievement at the school.

To do this they have made a wiki (with static pages of information) and a blog which is linked into the side navigation bar of the wiki. We will be working on this again next week so I will post a link to this. We are also thinking that videos, photos and podcasts could be a part of the blog to really increase student interest and voice in and on the blog. DNI are going to be looking at the work that Ryan (Outram Lead Teacher) has done on the Outram Sports Blog.

Dance Videos

Andrea at DNI takes a dance elective during the year. She has a great action research project planned. She is going to teach one dance to the students using a peer feedback teaching strategy. She will then teach another dance but instead of getting the students to peer assess, she will get them to self assess their work. She will be working with the students to see which type of assessment is more effective for them as learners, peer or self assessment.

For both the peer and self assessment Andrea will be using video as a part of her teaching. We talked about some of the resources for digital photography on the Otepoti wiki that she could modify to help the students improve their own filming. We also looked at video teaching resources for dance on teacher tube and video jug. She made her own wiki and a teacher tube account. Andrea can upload the movies the students make of their dancing to her teacher tube account and then take the embeddable code and organise these dances on her wiki. Her students can watch their dances easily and Andrea can organise her class having some students assessing their dancing watching the videos and some practising or filming their dances.

One thing that is important if you are going to upload your movies to a site like teacher tube is to save the finished movie project as a movie. Lots of people don't realise that audio, movies, even powerpoints are not finished movies until you render them. Movies will play like competed movies on your laptop because all of the audio files, pictures and film you have put in the movie project are on your computer. If you tried to play this project on another computer a lot of this information would be missing. You must save/publish/render your project as a movie and for Andrea she must do this so her files are small enough to upload onto the web. This is an option as you go through the saving process.

I was also telling Andrea about this video, she might like to use in her dance class. A group of students and teachers in New Zealand were inspired by Matt's video and made their own. It would be interesting to see if these videos inspire Andrea's dance class to do something innovative.

Collaborating- Professional Communities

The technology team at DNI can see a need for a way for them to work collaboratively with other technology teachers around Dunedin. They would like to have an easy way to communicate with all technology teachers around town to share knowledge about the best places to source materials, new ideas and resources.
Tim, Steve and Helen had already thought that a blog might be the best way to do this. The advantage of the blog when each teacher has the time to check the blog or make a request for information others will be able to answer or feedback to them when they are free. The blog makes it possible for busy people to collaborate when it suits them. At this stage they will leave it closed and get it going with technology teachers in Dunedin, but I suggested that eventually they open it up and they may find they can make all sorts of connections with other technology teachers all over the world, or people in related industries.

We also discussed that on my next visit we would look at Skype and using this as a resource to get in touch with people working on projects in the real world relate to the types of tasks and briefs the students are working on in class. Perhaps the blog will be one way of tracking these people down.

Blogging about products in food technology

Ann at DNI is a very inventive food technology teacher, she has some really innovative things going on in her classes including a Top Chef competition.

We went over a few video sites she might use for recipes and instructional videos. Teacher Tube, You Tube and Life on Video (video jug).

We also discussed using mash ups, which enable you to synchronize PowerPoint with video or audio. This would enable Ann's students to make their own instructional videos and recipes.

One thing that I was stuck on was how we would get all of Ann's students as authors on the class blogs we made. Each of her groups will have a blog which we linked to all of the class blogs. Ann will have her own blog also to share her learning with the class throughout her action research learning process, and she will be able to present this at the end of her research.
Usually to add people as authors of a blog with Blogger, you go to the settings area/ permissions and add the new authors email. The new author then goes through the link sent to them to become a member of the blog. Ann's students do not all have email addresses and I thought there must be a way for her to do this easily. I had a bit of a search around Blogger help and searched the help forum of past questions other had asked and found out how to add all students using just one email account.

You need a gmail account, these are free to set up and you would not need to use it past setting up the blogging accounts. If you already have a gmail email account then just use that.
Then in the settings/ permission area instead of putting the email as normal you write your email address and between your email name and the @ write +child's name.
For example dejmclean+bob@gmail.com (the blue part is not normally part of my email address). You can repeat this for each child in your class and all of these emails will come to your account. Each child will then have to join blogger by following the link but it saves you making email accounts for students that they wont use. This way one email account for every child in the class.

Although this is a neat time saving trick, I hope people also see how useful online help, espeically forums can be. Anytime you think 'I will I could do...' or 'It would be really handy if..', someone else has usually had the same thought or asked the same question and you probably can do it, it's just a matter of finding out how.