Ok - it’s been a while since I posted on here but I thought it would be fun to mention a couple of things that I am looking into at the moment. Hopefully at some point in the near future I will stop just looking into things and actually start using some of the great web 2.0 stuff that is around. I still struggle to work out how to actually use the resources that are out there. By that I mean I know how to use them in terms of logging in and posting messages and the actual technical side of the stuff but I don’t know how to use them in my classroom.
I guess that’s where the gift is. It’s what I’m striving for. When I’ve found it I will let you know. But until then I will just keep telling you about stuff I find. Neither of the following things are new but I’d like to mention them.
The first is Delicious. Not the food magazine that my wife subscribes to but a social bookmarking site that is really taking off (and has, indeed, been taking off for a while). I have setup an account for my school but not put too many links on there yet. It’s a great way of keeping all your much liked and useful links in one place you can access from anywhere with an interweb connection. It’s free too which makes it even better! There’s a lot more to it - such as tags, bundles and networks but I’m not going in to that.
The second thing I’d like to mention is something I use on my personal blog and have started using a little bit in my classroom but not in a ‘real’ way. It’s Twitter. Twitter is:
a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
Basically it’s a status update tool - you get 160 characters (or something like that) to say what you are up to. Like a mini blog. You can send messages to it via email, your blog, your mobile, a downloaded desktop tool or even the website itself. I don’t think you can send messages via post yet though. I like it. I’ve started using it a bit as a plenary tool at school - at the end of each session, after I have done the main plenary I will ask the kids to compose a very brief summary of what we have been learning (basically comes out like our WALT). Through Twitter you can follow people’s updates and see what they are up to. At the moment the kids don’t have anything to do with the Twitter page itself - I add that after the lesson - but it is useful for quick updates of the website and blogs etc and a good review tool for my class. I can see it being used as an instant publishing tool further up the school - so as soon as children find something out they can publish it to twitter or even ask questions of people who ‘follow’ them. Tom Barrett talked at length about Twitter and using it in the classroom over on his edublog.
Well - it’s a new term, a new year and all that. Hope you’ve had a great Christmas and a bit of a rest. Waiting for me in my pigeon hole this morning was a copy of Primary Choice - a seemingly advertising driven magazine full of KS1 & 2 resources for the Primary classroom - it’s the first time I’ve seen it. Anyway - there was a very nice little article in there from a guy called John Sutton. He points to a marvelous site/application called VoiceThread. John said that it is going to be the most common “have you seen this?” education resourcen of the year. So I am simply setting the ball rolling by mentioning it here!
VoiceThread calls itself an online media album. The idea being that you can upload an image, document or a video and then add a commentary (audio or text) to the item you have uploaded. But it doesn’t end there. Other users can register and add their own thoughts and comments too.
It looks fantastic as a simple resource for thoughts aroung pretty much anything! I talked earlier about asking “What’s in a picture?” and this would be a great extension of that activity. Instead of, or, probably better, as well as, discussing the image children could go to our audio area and record what they are thinking. I know there will be many other ways you can use this and I look forward to working it out! Have a look at it and see if you agree with John Sutton about this one.
In my quest to find a reason to use blogging / wikis / etc for educational reasons I have stumbled across Common Craft. They make a video animation series called “… in Plain English”. They describe how to do things in, you guessed it, plain English. They are pretty handy. Not so much for my quest to use this all to teach the kids in my class but a useful place to send people who are new to this kind of thing. The following one is an example - it’s about blogs. And it’s in plain English!
One of the best things about SLICT was the number of links and suggestions that came up from so many different people.
My favourite of the lot so far has been Animoto. Accoring to the About Us section on the site Animoto is:
a web application that automatically generates professionally produced videos using their own patent-pending technology and high-end motion design. Each video is a fully customized orchestration of user-selected images and music. Produced on a widescreen format, Animoto videos have the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.
It’s an easy to use website that lets you upload photos and attach a soundtrack. The site then turns these photos into a music video style animation. So far we’ve made use of it at the photography club at school - the children took pictures around the school and then made some animations. You can see one of the examples on the school website. It’s pretty easy to embed the animations in a site (as shown on the school site) and it’s pretty simple to create the videos themselves.
At the moment we haven’t paid the $30 for the unlimited longer animations so we are restricted to 30 second files. This is quite restricted but there are a couple of things that need to be sorted before I would pay for the service - the first is, I think, on the way - the ability to download your animations once created. The second I don’t know about - the transitions are often too quick - the pictures have fancy looks applied to them too quickly. Sometimes you just want to see the picture. I guess this might be better if you have a longer video using fewer images.
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