Three Steps to Connection

Ms. Mulholland guides the students in a self discovery lesson.

We took three major steps forward this week linking our Connected Classrooms. The first event was the successful hosting by Aislinn Mulholland of a Reading Power lesson. This will be followed by several more lessons as she develops the theme of Connecting with the students. I think we were all impressed by the degree of engagement shown by the kids. They eagerly participated, and there were no behavior issues, which is a sure sign of good teaching.

Bridgit http://www2.smarttech.com/st/en-US/Products/Bridgit/ is a software package that allows for remote sharing of SMART Boards. Simultaneous transfer of information among the classrooms is key to the success of our endeavour. The system worked well. Audio sharing remains a challenge, but we suspect that it is a server issue. It is magic to watch the conference screen as your desktop or SMART Board content appears at the other remote locations.

The greatest success of the week was the Friday Connected Classroom rendezvous. Kids travelled to Ashcroft to participate in a day designed to create bonds of friendship. Bonds that we will use to accelerate the virtual connections back in the classroom. It is hard to grasp how much the day meant to the students unless you are familiar with the isolation of a small rural community. Again Aislinn did a magnificent job of orchestrating the day with both planned activities and adequate free time. From the nervous kids that filed into the Ashcroft gym to confident friends, the transformation was amazing.

Students are beginning to use multimedia to document and share their experiences with each other and the world. This week Cayoosh Kidz created an October news video

http://www.vimeo.com/6908719 , a field trip video http://www.vimeo.com/7017080 and a photographic essay of their adventures http://www.flickr.com/photos/grade5/ . All told it was a good week for Connecting Classrooms.

The Connected Classroom Project Continues

Week four of the Connected Classroom has passed. We connected with our first video conference in the second week and took delivery of the net books shortly after that. The Kidz were over the moon with excitement at having their own net book. These aren’t dinky little play things. They come with almost a GB of RAM and a 1.6 MHz processor. You can even do video editing with them! The Smart Board is being integrated into daily lesson plans. With Bridgit software the Smart Board will reach across the internet into other Connected Classrooms. The virtual conferencing software program Elluminate is being used for peer to peer student conversations. Its video ability is a great attraction for the students.  With a bit more practice we will integrate Elluminate in a wide range of  educational interactions. We have done some multimedia work too. The Cayoosh Kidz vlog has been updated and new pictures are on Flickr. The students wrote about their summer on the netbooks, saved to their flash drives and then printed the stories in the computer lab. They have created posters, business cards and Wordle art and a host of other digital content. We finished a video on the forest fire above Lillooet this summer and have started planning our first news cast. This is an exciting project!

Why are these the best times to tell multimedia stories?

•  We are seeing undreamed of possibilities for sharing our creations. Through web 2.0 social networking via the internet we can have an audience of thousands and possibly millions. All this with no real cost. Youtube, Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and Del.icio.us provide us with infinite possibilities for meaningful exchange.

 

•   The dramatic drop in the hardware costs of creating multimedia stories brings unprecedented opportunities. Not only has it dropped to affordable levels but it is set to drop a lot further! A dozen years ago a video camera with professional features would cost tens of thousands of dollars. Now cameras such as the Canon XH A1 can out perform those earlier monsters for around $3000. If that still seems too rich for your wallet, take heart; 75 000 people have viewed our 50 odd Cayoosh Kidz videos. These videos were done on a camera costing around $300.

 

• There is the availability of free, or near free multimedia editing software: software for video editing, photoshop-type programs for pictures and Audacity for editing sound. These programs ensure that we can sculpture our raw files into pleasing final products.

 

• We not only have the technical means to produce multimedia stories; we have the evolution of accessible simplified new media grammar. With radical changes in the news industry, new approaches to creating web based media have appeared. These approaches easily transfer from the news-gathering realm to the educational. Educators are under the same constraints of time and budgets as reporters. By learning to tell stories like reporters we can quickly master the skills necessary to both tell our own stories, and assist our students to tell theirs. These emerging resources can be found at sites such as Advancing the Story  or Mastering Multimedia . Here they boil down the process of digital creativity to its simple essence and provide great models to inspire us.

 

We have the tools and we have access to the techniques, now all that’s needed is the creative spark. What are we waiting for?

Crickets of Summer

Cricket (click)

The cricket comes to you from under a log next to the Fraser River just below Lillooet. It was one of those hot summer evenings where the air still bakes even after the sun is behind the mountain.

 

Over the Christmas holidays I am going to be exploring podcasts, blogs, Twitter and Facebook. I would like to see how these social networking tools are being used to further student achievement. Of the four, Twitter http://twitter.com/OakesMedia seems the least useful but that may be because my life is boring or I lack imagination. If you have seen Twitter used constructively please leave a comment. My Facebook account is under the name of Ken Oakes and you are welcome to have a look too.

 

You may have noticed that I have included a blog roll and a direct link to the Cayoosh Kidz Fickr site. Once I get over this end-of-term cold I will experiment by including different media on the blog.

 

Ken

Media Type 2 – Images

 

Using a couple of photographs on your web page is easy, but have more than a dozen and it starts to become confusing, especially if you want to change them often. Flickr http://www.flickr.com, or other similar photo sharing sites, provide the ease and flexibility that you want to display photographs. Using a media hosting site you can easily display hundreds of photos (and videos), write about them, and link them to blogs, all with a few mouse clicks. Best of all it is free.   

 

Telling Stories

 

The type of images that can be displayed is only limited by your imagination. For example you can display art by taking pictures of student projects. Uploading takes less time than stapling them to a bulletin board. Students can explore photojournalism by explaining and commenting on their photographs; Flickr can become blog-like in its function. Your can see some of the possibilities by looking at http://www.flickr.com/photos/grade5/. Content intended to be displayed for extended periods is worth placing on your webpage http://www.cayooshkidz.net/interviews/mrsay.html .

 

Safety and Legal

 

The wellbeing of students is an absolute priority. Cayoosh Kidz never allows any identifying personal information to be associated with children. First names and photographs never appear together and last names are never used. We encourage students to create a web nickname to protect their identity.

 

Students do not have access to the sites where the information is stored. They present all of their work to a teacher who then posts the information. This prevents any possibility of direct contact between the students and someone who has seen their work online. Make sure that your school has a signed release form for every child that will be part of the multimedia project.

 

The images on the Cayoosh Kidz web site are student created photographs. It is necessary to carefully edit all photos for appropriate content before uploading them. Our resolution is kept low to discourage copying of the photographs.

 

The Canadian government provides an excellent resource to ensure general safety while using the Internet. http://www.safecanada.ca/link_e.asp?category=3&topic=94

 

Links for better photographs and learning ideas:

 

http://www.adobe.com/education/digkids/lessons/index.html

http://www.fujifilmusa.com/JSP/fuji/epartners/LearningLessonPlans.jsphttp://www.kodak.com/eknec/PageQuerier.jhtml?pq-locale=en_US&pq-path=317http://www.microsoft.com/education/Pictures.mspx  http://www.shortcourses.com/