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!

Migrating to Mac

Visiting Friends in Alberta

It’s been a week now since the School District kindly provided me with a Mac laptop to facilitate creating and sharing multimedia in the classroom. While relatively pricy there really isn’t anything in the PC world to match the MacBook Pro.

I was on holidays in Alberta and purchased the computer at the University of Alberta’s Book Store. It was a pleasant and painless experience especially considering that someone else was paying the tab. With the computer I also bought the iWorks bundle of programs. Next I was off to Starbucks to set the thing up. I suppose if I had read the instructions and watched the tutorials it might have been a little faster to get up to speed, but the setup was so intuitive that just about everything worked flawlessly. And hey, what can I say, I’m a guy.

On a side note having a Mac really makes working with my iPod touch a lot easier. The integration between the two is really slick. I look forward to exploring the educational possibilities of the Mac-iPod combination.

Email, pictures and sound files were all easy to create and and share. I am waiting for the video editing program Final Cut Pro to arrive, but in the meantime I was pleasantly surprised with the free iMovie program that came with the Mac. I used it to edit a video about an end of year event that we had at school – Nature Day.

The only task that I have been procrastinating about is wrestling my address book off of my PC. Who knows, maybe it will prove to be as easy as everything else with the Mac.

Resources

 

Sometimes life doesn’t unwind the way you hoped; take for example these holidays. It all started well enough but then came the scratchy throat, the stuffy head, and finally the cold from hell! Now in a world where there is much want and suffering a head cold is hardly a tragedy, but it did change my plans. Instead of doing a lot of work I spent time surfing (and sniffing). Through the dull haze I found a few sites to share.

 

Here is a source for a ton of royalty free music http://mashable.com/2008/06/30/free-legal-music-sites/, great additions to any multimedia project.

 

As mentioned in the last post, I have been experimenting with Twitter http://twitter.com/OakesMedia . I found a couple of articles about its educational use 3 scenarios for using Twitter with your students at teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk  and Can we use Twitter for educational activities?

 

Ning is a hot social networking site which allows you to structure social networks how you choose. Here is a short article explaining the basics of Ning http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7036.pdf.

 

And finally, to any of you who are beginning to write blogs, Daily Blog Tips provides a wealth of well written insights into the process of creating useful and accessible blogs.

 

Have a Happy and Healthy New Year.

 

Ken

Getting Student Writing On The Web – Media Type 1

 

Getting student work on the web doesn’t need to be difficult. Using a blog gives you complete control over student content, costs nothing and can be expanded to become a media rich environment.

 

The Written Word

 

The Cayoosh Kidz website www.cayooshkidz.net uses new media as its vehicle, but its core is the written word. Students constantly write scripts, news reports, emails, radio plays, blogs, etc. The awareness of a real audience to share their stories with can unlock the creative process, especially when the audience will be in the hundreds, if not thousands.

 

Blogging

 

Blogging is easy and you have creative control over the site. Set up an account with Blogger, WordPress, or Flickr (depending on what combination of content you want) and you can share student work in minutes. The process is no more challenging than setting up an email account.

 

Blogging, Vlogging and Glogging (not flu symptoms)

 

What is the difference between Vlogging, Blogging and Glogging? Well increasingly very little as the four different media forms (text, image, audio, and video) are merged together on the internet. With a blog host such as Blogger  https://www.blogger.com you can write a story, record sound, attach a video, and link  images from your Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/grade5/ account. Conversely you can accomplish much the same result by starting with Flickr and linking out from it.

 

My best advice about blogging is to try it. And if your first blog doesn’t work out your second one will be better. Our class blog http://pikanews-5.blogspot.com/ may give you some ideas about what you might like to do.

 

Ken