Archive for the 'CatchAll' Category

Nov 21 2008

Playing with Animoto and Glogster

Published by Gary under CatchAll, Tools


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/

No responses yet

Oct 04 2008

Adding The Sudent Blogs

Published by Gary under CatchAll


I used to have students blog using one Wordpress install. I would then create student accounts on the site so they could add blogscreen shot of wp-o-automatic 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.

No responses yet

Sep 04 2008

Using a Gform to Collect URLS

Published by Gary under CatchAll


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 »

No responses yet

Aug 29 2008

Another tweet….

Published by Gary under CatchAll


From a tweet sent to @jepcke I read about wordle. So I took my kids reflection on what they learned this week and created a wordle image. I uploaded the image to Flickr using Jing. I then went and imported the images into Animoto from Flickr and on to my Youtube area. The resulting Video is below. Was a bit of fun!!!

One response so far

Aug 25 2008

Online Textbooks

Published by Gary under CatchAll


Current crestImage via Wikipedia

View: floor level…me on carpet (our shipment made it)…repeat of the Wigam V Chelsea game on TV…dog on carpet…cat running in front of us…weird looking indoor pond in the background. Will look better soon but I will not post any pics for a while.

Dad,…… this sucks. The only thing the online text review gives me is a pdf. Can’t they do better? Something interactive? Not yet I guess Aaron. Maybe WOW needs to develop something that includes the ability to do a linear regression as a path to get more gear.

Sure Dad……… followed by a long talk about how you get gear. For those that think you do not learn playing games, you should have listened to that description.

New PD goal…..look foolish in WOW

I am lazy and I like Zemata.

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

No responses yet

Next »