My time has been short the past couple weeks, but my students have been creating a lot of great content.  They’ve also bombed out on a few things.  Last week my 8th graders were working on podcasts for our wave energy unit in physical science.  What started off promising ended as a big buzzkill.

With limited access to the lab and computers dying off in my room, we had to do everything in stages.  Two Fridays ago, the students wrote an essay (on paper) about the things they’d learned and the experiments we did for our wave energy unit.  In one experiment, we generated tones in audacity from 10-30,000 Hz and the students gave each other hearing tests using some borrowed iPods (see picture above).

On Monday, the students got to practice with Audacity in the lab while two students at a time recorded their essays on teacher laptops in another room.

On Wednesday, I uploaded their voice overs to my drop.io.

On Thursday (our next open day in the lab), the goal was for the students to edit and finish their podcasts (1-2 minutes).  Since all we had was audacity and a short time in the lab, I exported a bunch of sound effects and background tracks from Garageband.  I then uploaded these to google docs and shared them with the students.  Being able to upload any file to google docs was helpful because it made it easier for the students to download all the files (for use in Audacity) at once.  Unfortunately, Internet Explorer makes this a 20 step process due to all the permission pop ups and so forth.  This brought the operation to a crawl and prevented any real progress, so I had to rework the plan for Friday.

On Friday, I divided the class in two.  Half of them worked on an independent activity while I reviewed the basics of Audacity with the other half - then we switched places.  The students then headed to their computers class, where the computer teacher was nice enough to let them use the time to work on their podcasts.  Upon finishing, the students were supposed to export their song as a 128 kbps mp3, upload it to google docs, and share it with me.  This proved to be too many steps for most of the class and I ended up with only 4 of 14 shared to me in the proper format.  Of the 4, two used music from their own collections that I deemed inappropriate and 1 had several mistakes in his voice over that he didn’t edit out.

It was a lot of work with not a lot to show.  Though it wasn’t a total loss - the students know how to use Audacity and it led to a good discussion on appropriate use of music - it certainly wore me out.  It’s a new week though and we’re starting a new unit - so hopefully things will start looking up.

I had a pretty full week last week, so I’m a little behind on some blog posts (and everything else).  My week ended with a presentation to a group fellow teachers on Saturday.  I partnered with Barb, an outstanding and innovative 3rd grade teacher, for a presentation on wikis.  Instead of giving the ins and outs of everything wiki related we decided to put an emphasis on embedding.  While there are a million uses for wikis and they are a great collaborative space, it’s difficult to add lots of content to a wiki, blog, or website if you don’t know how to embed.  This seems like a simple enough task, but something a lot of educators don’t know about.

Most of the teachers in our audience were experienced teachers, inexperienced with technology.  During the presentation we started a new wiki on PBworks and then had the attendees add all the content to it.  While we didn’t get to all the items on our agenda, most everyone had a good grasp the basics of embedding and manipulating content on their pages by the time we finished.  You can see the wiki by clicking here.

There were a couple other interesting points of information that came out of the presentation.  We gave a survey at the beginning and I was pleased to find that most teachers had access to labs or rolling carts on a regular basis. Unfortunately, many schools did not have wireless.  Also, most of the teachers reported that sites like YouTube weren’t blocked.  One of the first things we had teachers do was embed a movie, so it was good to see that they’d be able to use Youtube videos when they make there own wikis.   We’ll be meeting with the attendees again in a month and everyone is supposed to share how they’ve used a wiki in their classroom.  I’m looking forward to see what people do.

I’ve used Audacity, a free and open-source audio editing program, the past couple years during a wave energy unit with my 8th grade.  Unfortunately, most of the computers in my room (and all the computers in the lab) don’t have microphones, and I haven’t been able to do some of the things I’d like with my students.  A comment response to a comment I left on From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Education, reminded me that we could use cell phones and drop.io to make quick, downloadable audio clips.

As students filed into class today, I asked a few of them to bring their cell phones. After a quick overview of our task for the day, we headed to the computer lab. During the lesson, students used Audacity to analyze the frequencies of the human voice. I had loaded 30 second clips from Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash and Heartbreaker by Mariah Carey onto my drop.io account, which made it easy for students to download and import into audacity. From there, they used the “Plot Spectrum” tool to figure out the low frequencies of Johnny Cash and the high frequencies of Mariah Carey.  (You may have to click through for the embeds of the student voice clips if you are on a feed reader).

While most of the class worked on the analysis of the songs, I sent a few students at a time out in the hall to call my drop.io account and hum some high and low tones (in some cases, more of a shriek).  Drop.io provides a phone number and extension that allows you, or anyone with the number, to leave messages on your drop.  The messages can be downloaded or embedded from anywhere.  After my students phoned in, the voice clips automatically popped up as mp3 files in my drop.io account, which they downloaded and the analyzed in Audacity.  We didn’t have time for everyone to do an individual clip, but the students were so preoccupied with Audacity and the voice clips that kept popping up in my drop it didn’t matter.  Drop.io provided instantaneous access  for everyone in the class to all the recordings we did.  It made it significantly easier for me and the students to use and access.

This function has a lot of potential for simple, student podcasts, audio reminders, or even a drop box for parents.  Since the audio clips are embeddable anywhere and also easily downloaded, it makes drop.io an extremely versatile platform.  Google Voice can do the same, but is limited to a single access point.  Unless you give out your account information, no one else can access it.

It’s snow day number two of the new semester and I’m almost stir crazy enough to go outside and film a re-enactment of To Build a Fire by Jack London.  Rather than freeze my camera as I fake freeze to death, I’ve been fine-tuning the course plan for a 1 credit class I’ll begin teaching in a couple weeks.  I’m looking forward to sharing and exchanging information with these rising teachers over the next several months.  In the first two classes I introduce two skills that I consider important for success with anything edutech related: Google Apps and Embedding. In those same classes I also establish the theme of the course - student centric teaching.

I consider Google Apps an essential piece of any rising teacher’s knowledge base.  From accessing RSS feeds in Reader to help build and follow a PLN to storing pictures in Picasa that students can access for projects, your Google account is a one stop shop - and it’s free.  Even though it can be difficult to untether people from Microsoft Office, once they see the utility of Google Docs they’ll never want to go back (in my opinion).  It’s difficult to help teachers gain a full appreciation of its utility in a one hour presentation or seminar - people need some time to use it and take it through the motions with real world tasks.  This is why I introduce it in the first class.  My school has had Google Apps Education edition for three years and I can’t imagine teaching without it.  It is often a centerpiece of my attempts to be as student centric as possible.  Google Apps makes it incredibly easy for students to create, collaborate, and receive guidance from the teacher.

The second skill, embedding, is a relatively simple one that many people familiar with educational technology take for granted.  Many young teachers (and experienced ones) can navigate Facebook with ease, but have no idea how to add a YouTube video or set of flash cards to a webspace.  There is so much great content that students and teachers can create on the web that would sit at a distant and hard to locate web address if it weren’t for embeds.  In my experience, this skill is usually embraced right away.  Show people how to embed a Grooveshark song on their site and hesitant tech students become instant webheads.  It motivates teachers to want to do more.  Below are some of the instructional companions to in class content on emedding.

For the past 4 years, my homeroom classes have built a website about recycling and clean energy use. Every year, we’ve used a different platform to build the site. I’m always looking for a way to make it easier for the students (and myself). The first year we used iWeb, but were restricted to one computer.  For the second GM site, we used Kompozer, but this was a huge pain and didn’t allow for much creativity with page elements.  Last year we used Yola, which was awesome, but made student corrections a little tricky.  This year, we’ve added three new sites to the Green Monkey family - a blog, a wiki, and a hybrid site (under construction).

The hybrid site is a combination of Yola and Glogster EDU.  One of the limitations of Yola is that there is only one user/administrator for a site.  To get around this, I log into my Yola account on several computers and set up the individual pages for the student groups.  The students can then work on their pages.  Unfortunately, if they need to make a change to their page, I have to log them back into my Yola account.  This is a cumbersome process if you have to do it on 7 or 8 computers several days in a row.

To get around this, we used Glogster EDU.  With Glogster EDU each student gets his own account (setup by the teacher) and can construct their own “glog.”  I had the students start a glog with some specific formatting for the background and then let them go to town on their page with the content they’d researched.  Once they’d gotten started, I logged them into my Yola account and had them embed their glog onto a Yola page.  We did this all in one day and once we got the glogs embedded  I didn’t have to log students into my Yola account anymore. (See student sample - it’s pretty cool).

In the process, the students learned how to embed content onto a web page and got to dig around with the embed code to make it fit properly.  The default embed for the glog is too big (not sure how to fix this on the Glogster side), so the students had to do a little math and fiddle with the height and width to make it fit.  From there, they could go back to their glog and make any changes they needed.

Around this time, for the past couple years, I’ve resolved to write more posts. This usually goes well for about a week or two until classes get into full swing and I end up with a lot less time on my hands. I’ve got some more teaching duties this semester, so it’s folly for me to say I’ll be posting more, but here are some things I’ve been using lately and hope to use more with my students this semester (individual posts to follow).

1. Drop.io - I’m in the process of overhauling the movies page on mrmansour.com and drop.io is the backbone of it. With drop.io you get an online storage space where you can ‘drop’ any file and then view, download, or embed it from anywhere. There is nothing especially amazing about this concept, it’s just really easy to use. I also like it because I can host any movie I want and won’t lose the sound on it. Some movies I upload to youtube get the sound cut out due to their strict interpretation of fair use - this isn’t a problem with drop.io.

2. Weebly and Yola - Both of these web apps allow users to create super easy websites.  I’ve been using weebly for some presentations my students and I have done lately because it’s very easy to set up accounts so the audience can participate and create as we present.  My 6th graders will be completing their Green Monkey Business website when we return from break using Yola and Glogster (see below).

3. Glogster EDU - Before break, and before our invention unit, the 6th graders built glogs about environmentally friendly practices for businesses.  They embedded the glogs onto a Yola site and can now update the site without having to go to Yola.  They just have to update their glogs.  This is nice because you can’t access a Yola site from multiple accounts, but embedding glogs allows you to do so.

4. iPod Touch Apps - During our invention unit, the 6th graders had to design an app for the iPod touch.  As part of the project, they had to investigate apps similar to theirs on the iTunes app store. (See partial student sample below - it doesn’t have the screenshots which they had to hand draw). Some of the students did their research on my iTouch and one student brought in his own.  I’m hoping to acquire some more of these to use for projects in the future.  The students are naturals and I’ve been experimenting with some free educational apps (Math Drills Lite is an excellent one) that we could use.  I’ve also started reading my first book on the iTouch using the Kindle App.  At first I couldn’t imagine reading a whole book on the iTouch, but it’s actually quite enjoyable.

A few months ago, my students and I went on a field trip to the local recycling plant. As we neared the end of our tour I realized I forgot my camera and we were in a prime photo location. Without a camera on hand, I asked one of the student teachers with me if he could take a picture of us with his cell phone (I’ve got a grandma phone with no camera). After doing so he emailed me the picture and I later uploaded it to my class picasa web albums account. It dawned on me after the fact that he could have emailed the picture directly to my picasa account.

Using just your cell phone’s camera, you can take pictures and have them on the web for instant access to your students. I like to have students act out or demonstrate concepts in pictures then put everything together into a presentation. To access the pictures for presentations, students pull the pictures from our class picasa account.

Step 1: Log in to your picasa account and click on Settings. In the ‘General’ section, check the box that says “Allow me to upload photos by email.” You’ll be prompted to enter a special word that will give you an email address that follows the pattern user.special_word@picasaweb.com (you can change the special-word at anytime).

Step 2: Snap a picture and email to the address you set up. You’ll see the picture you sent show up in an album called “Drop Box.” Click on this album and then go to Edit–>Album Properties.  From there, set the share options to Public.  This allows your students access to the pictures you shot in class.  The default setting is private, so no one will see your pictures unless you change it to public.  You can change this back at any time.

The great thing about Picasa is that it connects to so many other things - such as Animoto.  From Animoto, you can tie into your Picasa account and have a movie ready for you in about 5 minutes.  Here is a movie that one of my students did at a presentation we did for some education undergrads.  The pictures were shot by other students on their cell phones and the video footage was shot with a digital camera.

In my post from a couple days ago I embedded a movie, but when I checked today it didn’t show up.  Here it is again.  I’ve also re-embedded it on the original post.

In my last post on student made movies I discussed x-tranormal.  The application itself (web or software based) is very easy to use, but getting students up and running on it can present some challenges (accounts, # of computers, downloads, etc.).  If you’d like to make student movies, but need something a little simpler, the answer is just a digital camera away.

Armed with any basic digital camera and a $5 card reader, you can produce student movies and post them securely to the Internet in a single period or less. This method bypasses all editing, but is the quickest and easiest way to get a student movie online.  It’s easy to forget that a digital camera does a lot more than take pictures.  Here’s how to get the most out of it (apologies if my steps are too elementary):

1. Switch your digital camera to movie mode.

2. Have students act out, present, or demonstrate the concept.  Try and keep the movie to a minute or less, otherwise film in increments.

3. Take the card out of your camera, put it in the card-reader, and plug it into your computer.  The card reader allows you to select a single item instead of downloading the entire contents of the card onto your computer.

4. Upload movie to YouTube if you aren’t as concerned about privacy or upload to drop.io (more on this in a future post) and set a password if you want to keep it private.  You can also make YouTube videos private, but it becomes more difficult to share with others who don’t have accounts.

One of the advantages of uploading to YouTube is that it gives you some basic titling capabilities.  If you want to add captions or a note to a video, it’s a relatively simple process.  The video below was shot, uploaded, and titled in about 15 minutes.

If you’ve got an iPhone or other smartphone that syncs to YouTube, you can do all this with just your phone.

X-tranormal has been buzzed about quite a bit in the blogosphere for the last year or so.  I’d checked it out several times, but hadn’t considered using it until I saw a student produced x-tranormal movie a few weeks ago.  It inspired me to give it a whirl with students in my geography class this week.

X-tranormal is an animated video editing environment that is very easy to use.  Recently, they’ve added a desktop version called “State” that is a free download.  The online version works very well, but the desktop version is supposed to be faster and doesn’t require a login.  In the online version, click “Make Movies,” choose your character and setting, and you are ready to go.  All you have to do at this point is write or copy and paste some text into the text box and hit the action button.   A few minutes later and you’ll have your own animated movie.   You can easily add motion, hand movements, and expression to your characters with some drag and drop buttons.
Student movie on Bolivia

For their assignments, my students had to write a news report about a country in South America.  They did most of their research on CIA Factbook, a site about etiquette in countries around the world, and New York Times  search.  In x-tranormal, I started a movie template for each student and logged them into my account once I approved their script.  From there, they could paste in their script and change the movie however they liked.

The students were able to figure out how to do things on their own and almost everyone completed their movie by the time class let out (though a few didn’t want to leave the lab).   As I suspected might happen however, many of the students lost their movies because they were all logged into my account at one time.   It wasn’t a terrible loss because everyone had already saved their written report on google docs so it was easy to fix.  Despite most of the movies not saving, a few survived and I’ve posted one of them above.

If you use x-tranormal with a class, keep these things in mind.

1. Make sure students have their script written beforehand.  It will be handy in case something goes wrong and they can get to the editing faster.

2. It’s probably best to have students create their own accounts (if they are over 13) or have multiple accounts for yourself.  This eliminates the problem of lost movies, but makes them more difficult to access and monitor.  Also, you could just download the desktop version and students could use it without accounts.

3. Beware that the homepage may have some questionable content on it.  There was a Tiger Woods parody on the main page that caught some students’ attention and was a distraction.