teachNbabble

Have not posted much in a while so I thought I would do two things. First I wanted to see if posting from a google doc had changed from the last time I did it and second we have finally completed a fun, well I thought it was fun, project in grade 6.

We started with a poem the kids wrote in their English class about their greatest fear.  They spent some time using audacity where they created an audio track for their poem. A music intro was added and they then exported the audio as an mp3. The kids analyzed the words they used in the poem and then started
looking for different images that might represent these words. They found graphics for their video and uploaded the graphics and audio to Animoto. After setting things up in Animoto they exported the video to Youtube.

The next step was to create a poster. After some discussion about different design considerations the kids created a glog. The glog needed to include  appropriate graphics, as well as, the text and video copy of their poem. The students then posted this to their blog and english wik and on the whole it worked quite well.

For the next semester I need to tidy up a few areas. Some students have had
difficulty embedding the glog into their blog or into their wiki. Also I need to create a rubric that helps them better understand the expectations I had for their audio instead of just having a rubric for the poster. Our equipment is not that great but the work they did on the audio could have been better. I also need to get into the habit of screencasting the different parts as with our schedule they forget a lot from week to week.

Anyhow here are some examples. Will be adding more later today.

http://alishan.glogster.com/AVP-Fear-Poem/

I used to have students blog using one Wordpress install. I would then create student accounts on the site so they could add blog posts to it. This year, with a move to a new school, I thought I would try to change the way I did things. I signed up all the students with an edublogs accounts. This was a bit tough at first I had all sorts of problems with password resets but lately all has been working quite well. What I wanted was to aggregate my student blogs onto one site this “mother site” would be a place where I could post different activities for the students to take part in.

There are two Wordpress plugins that can help this all work, FeedWordPress and WP-o-Matic, both can do what I wanted. I ended up using WP-o-Matic. After installing this plugin and activating it I changed some of the default options in the Options Menu so the Feed Date and the Post title links to source were selected.

I noticed that when I clicked on the post category, in my case Our Class Posts, that I would only get part of the feed. To make sure I got all of the feed I changed the the_excerpt to the_content in the archive page template. This would allow me to see the full feed.

So now the content is automatically created based on the rss feeds coming from each student site. The only thing left to do is adding all of the student RSS feeds.

In on the preview version and it just seems a lot more solid. It was dead simple to create a lifestream. I was surprised at how it could bring everything together into one simple timeline. We will be using it soon with the kids as they study Ancient Egypt, will be interesting to see how it works for them.

I was having some difficulty aggregating all of the kids different Edublog feeds, I have about 80 kids that are trying out blogging for the first time. Continue Reading »

Remember playing with Muxtapes a while back. Wondered how they could post the music the way they did? I guess Muxtapes had some difficulties but into the void comes 8tracks. This 8track is a few songs loosely organized around Mark Knopfler.