And they’re off!
Now that we are approaching the third week of school, maybe we can all take a breath and think about how we plan to use the things we talked about in the Academy with our students. From electronic portfolios to digital stories, there are many ways to take what you’re doing and make it current with the technologies we discussed. In addition, you might consider using a blog with your students. It’s possible to obtain a free blog at edublogs.org and have your students respond to a question and then comment on what each has said.
If you’ve had the opportunity to check out Will Richardson’s book on blogging,wikis, podcasting and more you might even be ready to get an aggregator to organize your blogs. It’s like having your newspaper or magazines delivered right to you. You can choose the blogs you’re interested in reading and when there’s a new post you’re notified right away. Bloglines is a really great site to sign up with to get started on this. The first ones I’d add are ElemTech :), weblogg-ed, and the PA Discovery Ed blog.
Filed under: Learning From and
Great idea, MIchelle! I’ll look forward to reading what people post. We might even be able to start a tech. leaders’ blog so we all know what we want to talk about at meetings!
My students are up and running like jaguars with technology. The first two weeks they created slides using MaxShow and what they did over the summer. They picked up quickly on the drawing feature, saving the files, and helping each other out. From there, we saved all the slides into jpegs, imported them into Photostory and let the movies begin. One student at a time, came to me and created the movie by speaking about each slide. They are so great. Last Friday, we had popcorn and vistors (Mary Kay, Nancy Griffin, Jane Dull and The Book Lady) watch the kids’ movies. They were so excited to have vistors and popcorn. This was also the first time they had seen each others videos. Next up on our agenda, digital stories with thier own characters and digital cameras.
Finally, we will be setting up our own classroom blog so they can respond to a story they read in guided reading groups. When I get a second, I am going to try making one on this site rather then blogger.
I finally figured out what I want my students to do in terms of movie making. My fifth grade students do a project on one-point perspective and I show them a powerpoint on how to make things look like they go back into space using vanishing lines. I started to save some artworks in powerpoint (using proper citation of course!) that the students will use to add vanishing lines to and illustrate the concept of perspective using Photo story. How should I save the photos so that my students can add vanishing lines on top?
Steph
You could save your pictures as any tupe of graphic file - jpeg or gif - but you would have trouble adding vanishing lines in Photostory I believe. You could do these much easier in PowerPoint using custom animation and layering. Put your picture as the lowest layer, and the vanishing lines on the hightest layer.
I hope this answers your question. Great idea Michelle to get us talking on here!
Bryan
In second grade at West Manheim Elementary the students have been experiencing the virtues of wireless. With the help of Mrs. Stetter we have been taking the laptops to different locations with ease. Keeping up-to-date on the hurricanes this season, the children have been able to view weather.com’s virtual maps and tracking devices on the laptop by cable to the TV screen. Insects have literally come to the classroom. We have observed a praying mantis as it catches its prey, and the life cycles of various moths and butterflies. The TV cable allows greater flexibility and immediate response to questions such as what kind of caterpillar did Shawn bring to school and what do we need to feed it? Taking pictures of some of the stages of the insects’ developments and supplementing the rest, we have compiled pictures and created butterfly and moth stories using PhotoStory. We are in the process of narrating our stories.
By the way… I forgot to mention… the butterfly and moth photostory projects are saved on the shareable under teachers/2nd grade for anyone to use. You can edit them too.:)